You're funding an eighteen-month plan against a customer who decides budgets three years out.
Nobody's lying about the timeline. The two calendars just don't touch.
That gap is where defense-tech companies die — usually with the technology working, the users asking for it, and nobody anywhere holding both the authority and the money to buy it.
The company dies the same way, either way.
What differs is what you can do about it.
If you’re building it…
You need to know whether anyone is authorized to buy what you built — and if not, whether that can be made true before the money runs out. The answer comes traced to documents you can open yourself, and it can be no. That is the cheapest thing I do.
If you’re funding it…
Your diligence priced technical risk and competitive risk. The company will die of acquisition risk — not M&A, the government kind: whether anyone is ever allowed to buy it. Knowable before the check, and watchable after it.
A deliberate fit.
We should talk if…
You've built something real and you need to know whether anyone is authorized to buy it.
You have a roadmap and you want public money aimed at it rather than chasing it.
You hold an award and you can see there is no more money planned behind it.
You're paying for the development yourself — out of revenue, grants, or your own balance sheet — and want to know whether there's a program at the end of it.
You're underwriting a defense-tech company and your model has no line for acquisition risk.
We shouldn't talk if…
You want a proposal written against a solicitation that already exists.
You want an introduction, and you want it to be the deliverable.
You want the answer to come back yes.
It’s a fit test, not a sales call. Tell me where you are — even if you’re still in ideation —
and you’ll get a straight answer, including “not yet.”
Either this becomes recurring revenue or it doesn’t.
Wes Brown — I read the defense budget for a living. Before that I made the decisions your proposals are written to. I read every inquiry myself.
One hour, free, and you’ll know.
The exit is a budget line.
Venture has put $86 billion into the hundred best-funded defense startups. The government paid $4.3 billion back to them last year. That gap isn't a funding problem. It's a permission problem — most of those companies are selling into money that was never set aside to buy them.
When an aerospace and defense company looks at acquiring a startup, it pays for one thing: a procurement budget line with a quantity on it. Not a prototype contract. Not a pilot. Not a budget line a friendly committee added for one year. If that budget line doesn't exist, there is no M&A at any price — except the kind that comes after a collapse — and the valuation has exactly one buyer left: the investor in the company's next round.
Whether that budget line exists under your portfolio company is knowable now, before a term sheet tells you.
What an acquirer actually buys →
Not ready to book? Kick the tires →