Defence
Autonomous systems, drones, defence-tech
Related market maps
Dive deeper: Defence market maps
Hand-curated landscape charts from the Dealroom data team. Each map ranks every tracked startup in the segment by valuation, revenue, growth and funding.
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🔥 Hottest sub-sectors
What's heating up inside Defence
Defence sub-sectors ranked by Dealroom's curated signal score (combines funding velocity, unicorn formation, recency). Tap any row to open the live Dealroom sector page with the underlying companies.
Heat = 50% YoY VC growth (capped at 5×) + 30% new unicorns 2025 + 20% scale (log EV). Filter floor: ≥30 VC-backed companies, ≥$1B sub-sector EV, ≥$10M last-12mo VC.
Sector comparison
How Defence stacks up
Combined EV vs. the other 17 simplified sectors, plus a 5-yr growth × current-size scatter. Outliers in the upper-right are sectors compounding fastest.
Every simplified sector ranked by combined EV. Defence's row is highlighted (#15).
| # | Ecosystem | Combined EV | 5-yr EV growth | Unicorns | VC invested | Tracked startups |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI | $3.5T | 9.2× | 320 | $145B | 18.5K |
| 2 | Fintech | $1.9T | 4.8× | 318 | $38B | 21.8K |
| 3 | Other B2B Software | $1.7T | 4.4× | 305 | $28B | 36K |
| 4 | Consumer Services | $1.3T | 2.4× | 220 | $22B | 23K |
| 5 | Biotech & Life Sciences | $1.1T | 3.4× | 158 | $26B | 9,200 |
| 6 | eCommerce & Marketplaces | $1.1T | 2.8× | 175 | $18B | 18.8K |
| 7 | Energy | $920B | 6.2× | 110 | $32B | 7,600 |
| 8 | Transportation | $880B | 3.7× | 88 | $19B | 4,400 |
| 9 | Health Tech & Medtech | $720B | 4.1× | 142 | $16B | 12.4K |
| 10 | Cybersecurity | $480B | 4.4× | 92 | $14B | 6,800 |
| 11 | Space | $380B | 5.6× | 32 | $7.4B | 1,400 |
| 12 | Food | $320B | 3.0× | 56 | $5.8B | 4,200 |
| 13 | Semiconductors | $240B | 7.6× | 26 | $8.4B | 980 |
| 14 | Edtech | $220B | 2.1× | 38 | $4.2B | 5,800 |
| 15 | Defence | $175B | 7.8× | 14 | $6.2B | 720 |
| 16 | Robotics | $165B | 6.1× | 28 | $9.1B | 1,600 |
| 17 | Marketing | $150B | 3.6× | 38 | $4.4B | 6,200 |
| 18 | Aviation | $95B | 4.2× | 12 | $3.8B | 540 |
Geographic concentration
Where Defence startups concentrate
Cities and countries ranked by Defence unicorns headquartered there, plus countries that over-index the global average (5× = 5× more represented than globally).
Premium analytics
What we don't show on this page (yet)
Founder origins, AI-talent leaderboards, live deal flow and the patent landscape are gated to logged-in Dealroom users. Book a demo to access the full Defence dataset.
Sentiment on X
What X is saying about Defence
An AI-synthesized read of the highest-engagement posts about Defence on X over the past 7 days. We rank by likes & retweets, ignore corporate channels, and surface the themes that broke out from real people.
Reading the room on X — pulling top posts and synthesizing themes…
Source: X recent search ranked by engagement (likes + retweets) · Synthesis by Claude · Cached for 1 hour
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