—Operating Model.

This is not a generic accelerator. The market is full of programmes that offer a cohort experience, a thin layer of learning and development, and some advisory contact. We are not that. Our accelerator is hands-on, high-intensity, and commercially focused from day one.

We issue a call to the best defence-relevant technology companies in the UK and those serving European markets — in the domains of defending critical infrastructure, cognitive warfare, autonomy at the edge, and AI for defence operations. We select ten companies per cohort. Then we transform their trajectory.

What that means in practice: a dedicated customer council reviews cohort products directly. We build product development roadmaps together and support them at every stage. We introduce active contracting opportunities along the way. We transform how cohort companies identify, pursue, and convert customer relationships. And we work on their investment roadmap, positioning each company for a credible fundraise within the programme period.

The sequencing is deliberate and important: customer first. Validate the product. Secure the first contract. Then go to the market to raise investment. We support the entire journey — including taking an equity position in companies where we participate.

We take equity positions in the best European defence technology companies. Our investment philosophy is straightforward: we are both intelligent capital and hands-on capital. We do not invest in a company and attend quarterly board meetings. We invest in a company's mission, buy into its capability, augment its team, and help it on its journey.

Investment takes three forms. First, we invest resources — expertise, access, introductions — free at the point of use, with commercial success converting to equity positions over an agreed period. Second, we invest directly and form joint ventures with organisations where a deeper partnership creates mutual value. Third, we act as the anchor tenant in a private fund alongside like-minded investors, acting as the exclusive investment pipeline into that fund — giving us the ability to deploy capital at much greater scale and ambition.

Where there is a clear customer demand signal but no available technology to meet it, we build the solution ourselves. Through our design and engineering studio, in partnership with Whitespace, we ideate, create proof of concepts, and develop design partnerships with customers — pulling through to contracted revenue, then scaling to additional customers.

We are currently developing three products. We know that some will fail, and we welcome that — the learnings, the customer feedback, and the relationships built in the process are real assets. We also forecast success from some, and we are building the mechanisms to capitalise on it. In due course, we will announce new products, new relationships, and first customer contracts.

We apply our own accelerator process to our products. If our methods are the right ones — and we believe they are — we should hold ourselves to the same standard as the companies we support.

Defence procurement is notoriously difficult. Long sales cycles, bureaucratic processes, and a supply chain structurally disincentivised to work with young, agile companies. This is a real barrier that we cannot choose to ignore — and we do not intend to.

We are building a commercial channel that allows startups, scale-ups, SMEs, and our own products to navigate defence procurement — providing access to the things that have historically been completely out of reach at early stage: accreditations, frameworks, clearances, facilities, and team augmentation.

In partnership with IMSL, we offer a route through every barrier that stands between a capable company and a defence customer. This channel operates both inside the accelerator and outside of it — any company in our domains of interest can access it, subject to our assessment process. That assessment process is also how we identify future cohort companies, investment opportunities, and new capability for the portfolio.

The commercial logic is self-reinforcing: we don't need to spend money to solve this problem, because the marketplace solves it in itself. More commercial success for portfolio companies means growing equity value. Growing equity value means the whole model compounds.

Looking beyond the near term, there is a larger prize. Today, hundreds of companies are building on platforms of their own choosing — each one facing an integration problem later, or a forced retooling when they secure a government contract. This is wasteful, slow, and avoidable.

We are building towards a connected, accredited, integrated technology platform — one that startups and scale-ups can build upon from day one, and that customers can trust to pull through to operational capability faster than would otherwise be possible. The platform serves both classified and unclassified environments, supports design and co-creation through to production, and connects coherently to hyperscalers, data platforms, integrators, and the major primes.

Because ultimately: if you want to get a product onto a Type 45 destroyer, you need to engage organisations like Thales. Building in isolation, without understanding the end-to-end delivery model embedded in the fleet, is not a solution. We are building the layer that makes the whole system work — from the startup's first prototype to the customer's operational deployment.

This is the 2027 and beyond story. Commercial success from this model begins to compound in that window. What we are doing now creates the infrastructure for that success.