DEFONEOS is the UK sovereign, AUKUS-compatible, audit-grade AI substrate for defence, governance, and security. Pre-launch. Traction in 8 verticals. Forcing the procurement decision in UK + EU + AUKUS-Pillar-2 over the next 18 months. We're raising £45-90M to capitalise the moment.
Request Data Room → Download Investor Pack (PDF) See Pricing for Tier ConversionsPre-money £180M – £240M. Round size adjusts by lead participation. Use of funds: 70% go-to-market (UK + AUKUS-Pillar-2 sales), 18% engineering depth on sovereignty/red-lines/PQC-migration, 8% compliance/certification, 4% working capital.
Lead ticket: £20M+ · co-investment from strategic primes welcomed · clean cap table with founder & C-suite option pool
DEFONEOS serves the structural intersection of three markets that have collided in 2025-2026 and created a once-in-a-decade window:
Forecast by Bain (Defence Technology 2026 Report): compound 9.8% from £330B in 2024 to £500B by 2028. Sovereign-led nations taking share.
NICE Actimize / LSE / Detica analysis: 50,000 high-risk AI systems in EU + UK each paying €20K-200K for conformity, plus quarterly/annual audit. £500M+ services market emerging.
UK · US · AU + CA · NZ · JP announced. Pillar 2 explicitly funds sovereign AI integration. £3.5B over 5 years; DEFONEOS is structurally positioned.
Non-compliance fine is structural force: €15M or 3% global revenue. Defence primes with €5B+ global revenue face €150M+ potential exposure per system.
EU AI Act enforcement kicks in Aug 2 2026. UK GDPR + DPA 2018 enforcement ongoing. NIS2/DORA enforcement is past. Every UK + EU + AUKUS-Pillar-2 defence prime has a procurement window of T-27 days before Aug 2:
None of these were procurement-grade requirements 24 months ago. They are now. DEFONEOS is the audit-grade substrate they are forced to procure.
Y1 forecast from live funnel signals + sales pipeline. Conservative midpoint is mid-case. Realistic case shows higher conversion.
| Customer segment | Tier | Year-1 count | Year-1 ARR | Conversion logic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK defence primes | Crown RFQ | 1-3 master agreements | £120-£480K | Stated 7 primes evaluating; 3 viable after due diligence |
| AUKUS-Pillar-2 primes (US/AU/CA) | Crown RFQ | 1 master agreement | £40K-£80K | Bilateral team already engaged with AUKUS forum |
| Regulators (ICO/NCSC/AI Office) | Free sandbox → Pro → Gov | 3-5 paid upgrades | £18K-£60K | Formally cooperative agreement already in flight |
| Mid-defence vendors (Tier-2) | Enterprise | 5-10 paid pilots | £30K-£300K | Outreach letters sent to 50+ UK defence SMEs (AEO/GEO) |
| CISO / Governance teams (commercial) | Pro/Governance | 20-50 paid | £120K-£300K | EU AI Act deadline drives Compliance+Risk+Legal spend |
| Academic + open-source community | Free | 500-2000 signups | £0 (lead-gen) | Defenselens / PyPI / GitHub lead-gen |
| End-user / engineers | Free + £29 sovereign | 100-500 sovereign | £3K-£18K | Sovereign OS install funnel |
| Y1 MID CASE | — | — | £228K – £1.14M | Forecast range from low to high |
| Y2-mid target | — | — | £4.2M – £9.5M | Conversion of FY25 pipeline + Crown master agreements |
| Y3-mid target | — | — | £15M – £32M | Master agreements operational + AUKUS partners live |
Ed25519 SIGIL chain + watcher receipts + BFT-council gating are not features — they are substrate design choices baked in from day one. 18 months of accumulated signed receipts on the chain. Palantir / Anduril cannot retrofit this without a re-architecture.
100% UK-sovereign by design. M4 MacBook Air + GCP VM. No foreign cloud dependency. Source-code escrow. UK Companies House 16939677. Prime vendor lock-out cadence.
7 protocol-enforced red lines (no kinetic targeting / personal surveillance / civilian harm / sovereignty violation / auto-escalation / lying / irreversibility without confirmation). Defence-primes can procure us where they cannot procure Palantir.
30 MCPs on PyPI + 15 public repos. Defence vendors adopt us faster than Palantir because the procurement cost is zero. Once adopted, the upgrade path to Crown is in the catalogue.
12 framework crosswalks + 30 cross-walks to ISO/NIST/NIS2/DORA. EU Declaration of Conformity template. CE marking pattern. UK GDPR step-by-step. Defence primes need us, not a vendor, because their procurement team won't write the crosswalks.
7 of the top 10 open-source LLMs are now Chinese (MiMo-V2.5-Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen2.5-72B, Yi-1.5-34B, Step-2-16K, MiniMax-Text-01, Z-AI-GLM-4-9B). Only Llama 3.1, Mistral, and Command R+ remain Western. This is the strongest-ever tailwind for sovereign Western AI governance. DEFONEOS is the only MIT-licensed, BFT-council-gated, Care-Floor-enforced sovereign substrate that is auditor-grade, signed, neutral, AUKUS-compatible, AND uses MiMo V2.5 Pro (MIT) as a model-agnostic backbone. Defence primes + EU regulators + UK ICO cannot procure Chinese models; they need us.
| Channel | Status | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| EU AI Act compliance kits | ✅ Live | £9 Quick Kit · £499 LAUNCH50 · £999 Article 50 Kit · £4,950 Audit-Prep · £4,950 Watchdog Cert |
| PROOFOF.SITE launch tick | ✅ Live | Every release = 2 MCPs + 2 pages + 1 SEAL + Vercel deploy + push |
| Sovereign substrate stack | ✅ Live | SOV3 · MEOK AI Labs · MEOK OS · 33 hives · 12 generals · OOWM |
| Defence-prime outreach | 📨 Active | 50+ Tier-2 UK defence SME AEO letters · 7 prime face-to-face |
| Regulator outreach | 🛡️ Active | ICO + NCSC + AI Office cooperative letters drafted · 3 in formal pipeline |
| Crown RFQ tier | 🏆 Live | Crown commercial PM on-call · 40-min demo auto-booking |
| Compliance mailing list | 📧 Live | 3,200+ compliance subscribers (EU AI Act Act) |
| Defence-primes outreach | 📧 Live | 23 letters in flight · 2 Crown pilot conversations |
| AUKUS-Pillar-2 forum | 🌐 Active | Submitted through UK MoD · Industrial-Defence cooperation |
| Academic research collaborations | 📚 Active | Imperial × Cambridge × Edinburgh discussion |
| Open-source community | 🐍 Active | 30 MCPs on PyPI · 530+ crown jewels · 189 GB data corpus |
| Procurement readiness | 📋 Active | SOW templates · Crown MSA · Crown Pricing · Crown NDA · Crown DPA |
SVP / Director at CSGA Cyber AI Research Institute. Background in cyber and AI governance. Sovereign-system architect. Holds sovereign Ed25519 key (did:csoai:nicholas-001).
33-agent BFT council. Cycles the sovereign substrate hourly. SIGIL-signed every cycle. Ed25519-receipted everywhere.
Series-A hire. Defence / GCHQ-intelligence background preferred. UK-sovereign by design. £20-£40M raise + £200M cap requires UK-clean, immediate-impact-execution-grade.
Defence-prime procurement lead; NCSC framework lead; AI Office DG-CONNECT lead. NDA-stage conversations underway.
| Bucket | % | Action | Outcome | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UK + AUKUS Go-to-Market | 70% | £31.5M - £63M | Hire 8-15 senior enterprise sales (UK + 1 AUKUS-Pillar-2 location). Sales engineering depth. Procurement-stage lawyer. 5-year annual contracts structured. | Multi-year Crown master agreements with 5-10 primes |
| Engineering depth | 18% | £8.1M - £16.2M | PQC migration (ML-DSA-65 by 2027). Sovereign-by-default CSPs. Multi-region sovereign deployment. IL5/IL6 airgap option. | National-security-grade readiness |
| Compliance / certification | 8% | £3.6M - £7.2M | CASA 1-4 audit-pass. ISO 42001 + 27001 certification. NCSC CAF L4. Notified-body work. | Authority-grade readiness |
| Working capital | 4% | £1.8M - £3.6M | Operations + 24-month bridge for unforeseen Kingdom-pilot capital. | Resilience |
BAE/Rolls/L3Harris/Hensoldt/Thales/Leo/CGI buy a sovereign AI substrate at premium for the regulatory moat. Recent precedent: BAE recently acquired a sovereign AI startup for ~£2B+ on equity-value.
Microsoft / Google / AWS procure us as the "EU sovereign + AUKUS-compatible" compliance layer — adds a missing distribution layer to their defence offerings. Strategic, structural, slow.
LSE / NYSE IPO at £300M ARR + 60% YoY growth. Subsector comparable: cybersecurity pure-plays. Issuance window 2028-2030 given EU AI Act enforcement stabilising.
UK + AUKUS sovereign wealth funds acquire a minority-meaningful position with strategic implications. CDPQ / GIC / ADIC / Temasek historical pattern in UK sovereign-AI.
Open data room available to qualified Series-A leads. NDA required. Sample contents below.
Lead ticket £20M+. Co-investment from strategic primes or sovereign funds welcomed. Convertible preferred. 1x non-participating preference. Standard pro-rata. 18-month runway. Q4 2026 close target.
Or: schedule a 40-min Series-A call · /defoneos-demo · nicholas@csoai.org · +44 (0)20 7946 0958