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

The Defense Tech Boom Is Real

Between 2016 and 2020, investors put roughly $40 billion into defense and dual-use technology companies. From 2020 to 2024, that number tripled to $125 billion. The surge signals something specific: the national security market is hungry for innovation, and the legacy contractors are not 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. He and his co-founders served in combat, found the technology inadequate, and decided to fix it themselves. Their story offers a practical blueprint for founders thinking about the defense tech startup path.

Build for the Person Holding the Device

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

Reveal Technology did the opposite. Smith and co-founder Andrew Dixon are both Marine officers who served in Afghanistan. They personally experienced the gap: outdated topographic maps, low-resolution imagery, and no way to generate intelligence at the point of the problem. Their flagship product, Farsight, lets operators use mobile devices to ingest drone video feeds and generate high-resolution 2D and 3D maps in real time.

"We were our customers," Smith explained on The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley. "We were the people we were trying to serve. That allowed us unique insight into the product development phase."

The principle applies beyond defense. Companies that build with deep empathy for their end users consistently outperform those that build to a requirements document.

The Bottom-Up Go-to-Market Playbook

In defense, the person who buys the technology and the person who uses it are rarely the same. The economic buyer sits at a headquarters desk. The user is a corporal on the ground. This abstraction kills products that start at the top.

Smith's team ran a blended approach:

1. Start with end users. They put prototypes into the hands of corporals, sergeants, and lieutenants during testing and exercises. This produced rapid feedback and genuine product-market fit.

2. Build groundswell demand. Once operators wanted the product, they became advocates. The demand signal flowed upward naturally.

3. Engage the top in parallel. While refining the product, Reveal engaged U.S. Congress members, program managers, and senior DOD decision-makers to line up funding and procurement pathways.

4. Let demand pull the sale. As Smith put it, "The economic buyer is always going to come along when there's an intensive groundswell of support and demand signal for a technology that they want."

This is 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 is not enough. Defense tech startups must clear a compliance regime that can add years to the adoption cycle if handled poorly.

The key certifications include:

One challenge that catches new entrants off guard: compliance reciprocity between agencies is limited. Satisfying the requirements for one customer does not guarantee acceptance by another. Smith recommends partnering with the end adopter early and being transparent about what you do not know. "That actually engenders a huge amount of trust," he noted.

For founders familiar with commercial compliance frameworks like SOC 2 or FedRAMP, defense compliance is a different scale. But the same principle holds: treat compliance as a competitive advantage, not a checkbox.

Why Traditional VC Does Not Fit Defense (At First)

Venture capitalists want fast growth in the early stages. Defense sales cycles are long. A standard seed-to-Series-A-to-Series-B timeline does not map to the pace of government procurement.

Reveal bootstrapped for the first several years. Smith deliberately avoided high headcount, high burn, and the pressure of investor-driven growth metrics. "We didn't get too far out over our skis," he said. The company raised a Series A led by Next Frontier Capital in Bozeman, Montana, and a Series B led by Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused firm whose founder Kevin Mandia was an early seed investor and mentor.

The lesson: patient capital and a small, focused team can outperform a well-funded but overextended competitor. Reveal is six and a half years in, now on the revenue hockey stick, and expanding through acquisitions. They recently won a U.S. Special Operations Command program of record for a biometrics product called Identify, competing against and beating legacy contractors.

The Acquisition Playbook for Defense Platforms

As defense startups mature, they become consolidators. Legacy primes like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have done this for decades: acquiring smaller companies to onboard innovation onto their platforms. The new wave of defense tech companies is following the same pattern earlier.

Reveal acquired a biometrics company, battle-hardened its prototype product, and won a multi-year program of record with SOCOM. Smith sees this as a repeatable model: identify emerging requirements through end-user relationships, acquire the right technology, refine it, and deliver through established procurement channels.

The company plans to expand into electronic warfare and signals domains, including network and cybersecurity tools, all optimized for mobile devices at the tactical edge. That same tactical-edge logic shows up in adjacent defense markets like counter-drone technology, where mobile detection, tracking, and response are becoming mission-critical. The portfolio approach mirrors how security-focused companies build layered capabilities across adjacent problem spaces.

Listen to the Episode

Garrett Smith shared his full story on Episode 90 of The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley, hosted by Jon McLachlan (co-founder of YSecurity and Cyberbase.ai) and Sasha Sinkevich (co-founder of YSecurity and Cyberbase.ai). The conversation covers how Smith and his co-founders went from combat operations in Afghanistan to building a defense tech platform in Bozeman, Montana.

Listen to the full episode for Garrett's perspective on why deterrence, not war, is the real product of defense innovation, and why the defense market needs Silicon Valley talent now more than ever.