Defense Startup Wedge Playbook
Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, on the defense tech startup playbook
The real advantage is not just better technology, it is skipping the government’s normal wait for a formal requirement and arriving with a working product that can be tested now. That is the different vector. Anduril did it with border surveillance towers and later reused the same stack in adjacent missions. Forterra is trying the same move in ground autonomy, with a kit that can be installed on vehicles already coming off factory lines.
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This playbook shifts risk from the buyer to the startup. Forterra says it put about $300M into its autonomy stack, and Anduril put billions into product development, so the company can name a price for a finished system instead of billing the government for every engineering hour.
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The wedge matters more than the slogan. Anduril entered through a smaller, urgent problem, border surveillance, where existing systems were expensive and outdated. That let it win early contracts, prove the product in the field, and expand into larger programs after trust was earned.
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This only works when the product is dramatically better or cheaper, not marginally better. In defense, procurement friction is so high that a 20% improvement is rarely enough to displace an incumbent. The product has to solve a mission that operators care about right away.
More defense startups will follow this pattern, but each will need its own entry point rather than copying Anduril directly. The winners will be the companies that self fund a concrete product, find an overlooked budget line with urgent demand, and turn one validated deployment into a repeatable program of record.