How to Build a Defense Tech Startup: Lessons From the Tactical Edge

Between 2016 and 2020, investors put roughly $40 billion into defense and dual-use technology. From 2020 to 2024, that tripled to $125 billion. The national security market is hungry for innovation, and the legacy contractors aren’t delivering it fast enough.

Garrett Smith, founder and CEO of Reveal Technology and a Marine Corps Reserve Lieutenant Colonel, built his company from direct experience. On episode 90, he and his co-founders’ story offered a practical blueprint for the defense tech path.

Build for the person holding the device

Most legacy vendors sell top-down: engage senior program managers, generate requirements, secure funding, push a product down to the end user. By the time the operator touches it, nobody has asked whether it solves their actual problem.

Reveal did the opposite. Smith and co-founder Andrew Dixon are both Marine officers who served in Afghanistan, and they experienced the gap firsthand — outdated maps, low-resolution imagery, no way to generate intelligence at the point of the problem. Their flagship product, Farsight, lets operators use mobile devices to ingest drone video and generate high-resolution 2D and 3D maps in real time. “We were our customers,” Smith said. “That allowed us unique insight into the product development phase.” The principle applies beyond defense: companies that build with deep empathy for their users consistently outperform those that build to a requirements document — the same lesson Illumio learned building a security product.

The bottom-up go-to-market

In defense, the buyer and the user are rarely the same — the economic buyer sits at a headquarters desk, the user is a corporal on the ground. Smith’s team ran a blended approach:

1. Start with end users — prototypes into the hands of corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants during exercises, producing rapid feedback and genuine product-market fit.
2. Build groundswell demand — once operators wanted the product, they became advocates and the demand signal flowed upward.
3. Engage the top in parallel — Congress members, program managers, senior DOD decision-makers, to line up funding and procurement.
4. Let demand pull the sale — “The economic buyer is always going to come along when there’s an intensive groundswell of support and demand signal.”

It’s the Silicon Valley playbook adapted for defense: build something people love, then let adoption drive the business case.

Compliance is a barrier to entry — and a moat

A great product isn’t enough. Defense startups must clear a compliance regime that can add years if handled poorly: Interim Authority to Test, Authority to Operate, Technology Readiness Levels, Integration Readiness Levels. One thing catches new entrants off guard — reciprocity between agencies is limited, so satisfying one customer’s requirements doesn’t guarantee another’s. Smith recommends partnering with the end adopter early and being transparent about what you don’t know: “That actually engenders a huge amount of trust.” For founders used to commercial frameworks like SOC 2, defense compliance is a different scale, but the same principle holds — treat compliance as a competitive advantage, not a checkbox.

Why traditional VC doesn’t fit at first

VCs want fast early growth; defense sales cycles are long. Reveal bootstrapped for the first several years, deliberately avoiding high burn: “We didn’t get too far out over our skis.” Later they raised a Series A led by Next Frontier Capital and a Series B led by Ballistic Ventures. Patient capital and a small, focused team can outperform a well-funded but overextended competitor. Six and a half years in, Reveal recently won a US Special Operations Command program of record for a biometrics product, beating legacy contractors.

The acquisition playbook

As defense startups mature, they become consolidators — the pattern legacy primes have followed for decades, now happening earlier. Reveal acquired a biometrics company, battle-hardened its prototype, and won a multi-year SOCOM program. Smith sees it as a repeatable model: identify emerging requirements through end-user relationships, acquire the right technology, refine it, deliver through established channels. The company plans to expand into electronic warfare and signals — including network and cybersecurity tools — all optimized for the tactical edge, the same edge where counter-drone defense is becoming mission-critical. Deterrence, not war, is the real product of defense innovation.