By Mrs Rachel O. Ajayi – It is sometimes said that Britain’s most valuable assets are its institutions and its armed forces. Increasingly, however, its future strength may be measured by something less visible: a cohort of founders who learn to build billion pound, profit making technology companies from inside the defence and security system.
That, in essence, is the opportunity opened up by the Defence Secretary, Rt Hon John Healey, in his recent appearance before the House of Commons Defence Committee – and it is one that Professor Chris Imafidon believes the country cannot afford to waste.
Defence Secretary who links security and growth
Healey’s performance before MPs was dominated, understandably, by questions of capability, readiness and traditional hardware. Yet beneath the exchanges lay a quieter shift in posture. He is one of the first occupants of his office to speak seriously about defence not only as an insurance policy, but as an engine of innovation and economic growth.
By signalling support for military linked technology start ups and the wider defence tech ecosystem, Healey is doing more than tinkering at the margins. He is beginning to place research, AI and digital capability at the centre of how Britain thinks about power. If sustained, this amounts to a redefinition of defence from a sunk cost into a generator of intellectual property, high skill employment and export potential.
Such a view is overdue. Every major platform and system now carries with it a heavy layer of code, data and artificial intelligence. The question is no longer whether defence will be digital, but whether the country that pays for the research will also build the firms that commercialise it.
From committee room to tech frontier
It was against this backdrop that Professor Chris Imafidon sat near Healey for more than two hours of questioning. At first glance, his presence could be mistaken for another expert voice in a crowded policy conversation. In reality, it represents something rarer: a bridge between the closed world of high stakes defence decisions and the equally unforgiving world of high growth technology.
Imafidon has long been known in Westminster and boardrooms as an authority on AI governance and digital oversight, advising chairs, non executive directors and legislators on how to turn artificial intelligence from a source of risk into a strategic asset. Less widely appreciated is his role in helping a real world AI company travel the full distance from early stage start up to unicorn.
As European arrowhead and Global Research Coordinator of fireflies.ai, the AI meetings mate, notetaker and meeting intelligence platform, he helped to steer a young company through the messy realities of product market fit, rapid iteration and international scale. Fireflies.ai has since achieved unicorn status while remaining profitable, an unusual combination in an era when many “unicorns” rely on hope more than hard numbers.
Together with engineer Isaac Udotong, Imafidon co founded the fireflies.ai user group, an apparently modest step that proved decisive. By putting real users at the centre of the product’s evolution, they turned a clever piece of software into a daily habit for businesses around the world. In doing so, they demonstrated that it is possible to build a billion dollar AI company that pays its own way.
The case for a unicorn blueprint in uniform
Military based AI and technology ventures do not lack for complexity. They are entangled with long procurement cycles, demanding security requirements and the sensitivities of dual use applications. These are not the conditions in which start ups usually thrive.
Yet they are precisely the environments in which distinctive, defensible intellectual property is born. Systems designed to protect lives and sovereignty tend, by necessity, to operate at the envelope of what is technically possible. If Britain can learn to turn that edge into enduring companies, it will have found a way to align its security needs with its economic ambitions.
Here, Imafidon argues, the country should resist the temptation to reinvent the wheel. The methods used to grow fireflies.ai from an idea into a profitable unicorn – an insistence on real world value, ruthless attention to user behaviour, disciplined governance and a refusal to sacrifice financial sanity for headline valuations – are not unique to one product or one market. They are, he maintains, teachable.
He believes that blueprint should now be consciously applied to the wave of AI and tech start ups emerging from the military and defence ecosystem. Officers, engineers and civil servants working at the cutting edge of cyber defence, autonomous systems and secure communications could, with the right guidance, become founders of the next generation of national champions.
Cyber Force: structure for a new age
Alongside his endorsement of military linked entrepreneurship, Imafidon has put forward a structural proposal that is likely to make traditionalists uncomfortable: the creation of an independent “Cyber Force” as a fourth arm of the armed services, standing alongside the Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
The logic is stark. Recent attacks and persistent vulnerabilities across government systems, financial networks, health services and critical infrastructure suggest that the United Kingdom’s digital estate is already a contested arena. With the increasing power of artificial intelligence, and the looming possibilities of artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, it is difficult to imagine that hostile states and non state actors will voluntarily exercise restraint.
In such a world, leaving cyber operations as a subsidiary activity risks confusion and delay. A dedicated Cyber Force, with its own leadership, doctrine and accountability, would recognise that the defence of the realm now takes place as much in server farms and fibre optic cables as in the skies and seas. It would also, implicitly, provide a focal point for the technologies, skills and firms needed to sustain that defence.
The link with entrepreneurship is not accidental. A coherent cyber arm, clearly defined and properly resourced, offers the possibility of stable demand, close collaboration and rapid feedback between front line operators and the companies that build their tools. It would be a natural incubator for spin outs and suppliers whose products could, in time, find civilian markets.
The quiet radicalism of teaching success
Imafidon’s manner is, by most accounts, self deprecating. He does not habitually dwell on his invitations from Queen Elizabeth II to national events, his service as Co Chair of the Platinum Jubilee STEM programme or his bestselling and award winning books on the late Queen and on Diana, Princess of Wales. He prefers to talk about systems, not himself.
Yet in this area he is unusually direct. Britain, he suggests, has been too modest in learning from its own successes. If it is serious about cultivating a generation of military linked AI and tech unicorns, it should not leave would be founders to pick up their craft by osmosis. It should deliberately expose them to those who have already built profitable, global companies in the field.
That would mean embedding entrepreneurial education – using live case studies such as fireflies.ai – into defence academies, cyber units and innovation hubs. It would involve pairing promising teams with mentors who understand both the technical and commercial dimensions of AI. And it would require a cultural shift in which turning defence grade technology into export ready products is seen not as a distraction, but as a contribution to national strength.
Healey has begun to sketch out the defence side of this equation. The economic and entrepreneurial side now demands equal seriousness. If the two can be brought together – if Britain can learn to turn its most sophisticated security challenges into the seedbed for its next generation of profitable unicorns – then the country’s most important future weapons may indeed be those who wear boots and write code.
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