Don’t sleep on our friends across the pond.
Arondite, a UK-based startup building integration and autonomous systems orchestration software, announced a “multi-million” pound contract with the Royal Marines to deploy its Cobalt software across the UK Commando Force (UKCF). The company told Tectonic that the deal is valued at £6M ($8M).
Arondite also announced that it’s expanding to Norway and investing £35M ($46.3M) over the next few years to build out its engineering workforce there. Two birds, one stone kind of day.
Race to integrate: In case your eyes have been more focused stateside, the UK has a fast-growing and increasingly well-capitalized defense startup scene (even if the budget may be wanting). Arondite, founded in 2023, has become quite the MoD darling on the software side.
The startup builds battle management software that makes drones—and all of the other tech and software on the battlefield—work together. Like glue, but high-tech and lethal.
- The company’s flagship command-and-control platform, Cobalt, is kind of the AI-powered connective tissue between different software platforms, robotic systems, autonomous vehicles, and sensors, enabling users to plan missions with these assets, simulate options, integrate data streams, and speed up decision-making.
- “If the UK Commando Force, or any other team we work with, buys a new sensor, data source or effector, we make sure it can be integrated into Cobalt,” Arondite co-founder and CEO Will Blyth told Tectonic, and the platform has “more than 50 integrations available today, with more being added every week.”
- On top of their work with the Royal Marines, Arondite has another multi-million-pound deal with the British Army’s 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team, part of the service’s Very High Readiness Force (i.e., the lads who drop into scary places from the sky at a moment’s notice).
Going commando: This isn’t Arondite’s first rodeo with the UKCF. The company has worked with them extensively in the past, including in a range of international exercises in the High North, but this contract expands Cobalt across all the fancy new tech the UKCF is getting its hands on to create “a unified software fighting system.”
“The UK Commando Force has an operational focus on Northern Europe, the High North and Arctic, but its forces operate globally,” Blyth said. “Cobalt is designed to be available everywhere users need it and to accelerate decision-making across every stage of those operations.”
- That includes “force readiness and sustainment, mission design and planning, live command of operations, and orchestration across the full sense-to-effect chain,” he added.
- The deal also coincides with the UKCF getting a £100M ($132.4M) funding boost through the UK Defence Investment Plan to develop future warfighting capabilities for maritime and amphibious operations in the Arctic.
Heading North: The UKCF’s operational focus on Northern Europe and the Arctic also helps explain why Arondite settled on Norway as the site of its first international office.
“Norway is a natural first step for us. It is on the front line of Europe and NATO’s Northern Flank,” Blyth said. “Their armed forces have a highly complex mission set, are forward-leaning in their adoption of technology, and Norway is one of the UK’s closest allies.”
- “As part of our work with UK Commando Force, we have already deployed to [the] region alongside UK and Norwegian forces on a range of exercises,” he added.
- Arondite is putting up £35M to build out its office in Oslo, but they’re planning to boost that investment as they deepen their work with the Norwegian Armed Forces.
Blyth is understandably fired up about two announcements, and the UK MoD’s procurement boss, Luke Pollard, is too.
“British defence tech is in demand,” Pollard said. “Arondite’s work with the Royal Navy will put cutting-edge software in the hands of our commandos, and their expansion into Norway shows the appetite for British technology among our closest allies.”
Watch out, y’all. We told you the British are coming.
