DefTechPod

About DefTechPod

DefTechLink podcasts are practical conversations about how defence markets actually work, starting with the United States and extending to the UK and allied systems. We speak with practitioners, operators, founders, and programme insiders about funding, experimentation, procurement, and why transitions stall or succeed. The focus is lived experience, not hype: what decisions matter, where risk sits, and how defence pathways behave in practice.

Publisher

DefTechLink.com

Category

technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Feb 2026

Latest episode

31 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

23 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   31 Jul 2026

   Useful Before Perfect: Mariia Cherpak on Ukraine, European Defence and Building Better Ecosystems

   In this episode of DefTechPod, Erica Dill-Russell is joined by Mariia Cherpak, a Berlin-based defence professional working across business development, strategic partnerships and ecosystem development in European defence. Originally from Kharkiv, Mariia brings together perspectives from Ukraine’s wartime innovation environment and Europe’s rapidly evolving defence industry. She is also involved with Women in Defence Tech, a professional community connecting people across industry, government, the military, investment, academia and start-ups. The conversation examines what Europe can learn from Ukraine without pretending that wartime conditions can, or should, be recreated elsewhere. Mariia identifies three important lessons: user-driven development, rapid iteration and genuine ecosystem collaboration. In Ukraine, military personnel are not simply the final recipients of technology. They often help shape it. Products are put into users’ hands early enough to generate meaningful feedback, rather than being perfected in isolation against requirements that may already be changing. That leads to a central idea in the episode: technology needs to be useful before it is perfect. Erica and Mariia discuss why companies should involve end users as early as realistically possible, while recognising that Ukrainian personnel are fighting a war and cannot be treated as a freely available testing service. Trusted organisations such as Brave1, accelerators and other intermediaries can help assess technologies, filter companies and create structured routes into testing without overburdening operational units. Mariia also explores the role played by Ukraine’s volunteer and charitable organisations, which have helped fund equipment, prototypes and early production. In some cases, they have acted like a form of early-stage risk capital. The lesson for Europe is not that private citizens should replace the state, but that early operational validation needs faster and more flexible funding before a system is ready for full procurement. The conversation then turns to Europe’s expanding defence investment market. More capital is entering the sector, but not every investor brings deep defence knowledge or the strategic experience needed to guide a company through testing, procurement, compliance and market entry. Accelerators, hackathons, professional communities and specialist advisers are beginning to fill some of those gaps. Women in Defence Tech is one example. Mariia explains how the community helps professionals develop credible networks, find opportunities and enter an industry that can appear closed from the outside. She also makes the case that defence needs people from a much wider range of backgrounds, not only military personnel and engineers. For founders, the episode includes practical advice on entering European defence markets. Companies should begin with the operational requirement, not the headline spending figure. They need to understand whether a country needs their capability, offers access to users or testing, has a realistic procurement route, and can provide suitable local partners. Europe is not a single defence market. Each country has its own requirements, institutions, procurement systems and industrial relationships. Small companies therefore need to choose their first market carefully rather than spreading limited resources too widely. This is a useful episode for defence and dual-use founders, investors entering the sector, professionals considering a career transition, and anyone interested in what Europe can learn from Ukraine about speed, collaboration and building technology around real operational needs.

2. 

   10 Jul 2026

   From Pitch to Adoption: James Murray on NATO DIANA and Defence Innovation

   In this episode of DefTechPod, Erica Dill-Russell is joined by James Murray, Accelerator Manager at Janus, the UK accelerator delivering the NATO DIANA programme in partnership with UK Defence Innovation. James brings a wide-ranging background in entrepreneurship, venture capital, university innovation and early-stage company building. Before joining Janus, he worked across entrepreneurship education, autonomous systems, drone companies and university seed funding, including the Oxford Seed Fund. His move into defence has been driven by a desire to use that experience to support founders building technologies that can matter to national security, sovereignty and the NATO alliance. The conversation starts with what NATO DIANA is actually designed to do. James explains how the programme supports emerging defence and deep-tech companies from across the NATO alliance, taking them through validation, testing, mentoring, exposure to end users and investor readiness. Janus delivers the UK programme, bringing together business support, science and technology, defence and security expertise, and deep-tech investment experience. Erica and James also discuss what founders often misunderstand about defence as a market. Defence is formal, regulated and difficult to navigate, but it is also deeply relationship-driven. Conversations after events, introductions through trusted networks, and informal moments around conferences can matter just as much as the formal programme itself. For companies without a defence background, learning how to build those relationships is part of the work. The episode then moves into dual-use technology, and James offers a useful challenge to the way the term is often used. Rather than treating dual-use as a neat technical category, he argues that it is often better understood as a business and market strategy. The real question is not whether a product can be labelled dual-use, but whether the capability is genuinely useful to an end user, whether it has been validated, and whether the company understands how to translate between commercial and defence markets. There is also a practical discussion about pitching. James has seen thousands of companies and is clear about what good pitches need: a clear problem, a defined customer or end user, evidence of validation, a realistic view of the market, and a strong call to action. He and Erica discuss where technically strong founders often go wrong, particularly when they get trapped in technical detail, fail to explain the operational problem, or do not show that they have spoken to real users. One of the strongest themes in the episode is the need to “get out of the building”. James and Erica both stress that founders cannot build credible defence companies from behind a screen. They need to speak to users, attend industry days, test assumptions, join relevant programmes, listen hard, and use feedback to iterate quickly. For companies coming into defence with no track record, this early learning and relationship-building can be just as important as the technology itself. The episode also highlights one of NATO DIANA’s most important advantages: reach across the alliance. James explains how the programme can give companies exposure beyond a single national market, connecting them with different NATO countries, different ways of working, end users, test opportunities and potential routes to adoption. He also talks about the Rapid Adoption Service and why access to a NATO-level programme can significantly change the commercial opportunity for the right company. This is a useful episode for founders, SMEs, investors and non-traditional suppliers trying to understand NATO DIANA, dual-use company building, defence pitching, end-user validation and how to move from an interesting technology to something defence users can actually adopt.

3. 

   3 Jul 2026

   From Cool to Credible: Tim Stringer on Gravity, Jet Suits and Defence Adoption

   In this episode of DefTechPod, Erica Dill-Russell is joined by Tim Stringer, VP Defence at Gravity Industries, the UK company behind the Gravity Jet Suit. Founded by Richard Browning in 2017, Gravity Industries began as something many people saw as extraordinary, futuristic and almost impossible to categorise. Since then, the company has taken the Jet Suit from spectacle to serious capability, demonstrating it with users including the Royal Marines, NATO mountain warfare units, the US Navy’s Joint Prototyping and Experimentation Maritime Programme, and the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre. Tim brings a valuable perspective to the conversation. Before joining Gravity, he served in the Royal Air Force and later moved through defence technology companies including Improbable and Skyfarer. That background gives him first-hand experience of both sides of the defence innovation problem: users who need better tools, faster, and companies trying to bring genuinely novel technology into a procurement system that does not always know where to place it. The conversation looks at what it takes to move a hardware-first, visually spectacular capability from “that looks cool” to “how would we actually use this?” Tim explains how Gravity has had to manage both the benefit and burden of the Jet Suit’s extraordinary public profile. The same thing that attracts attention can also make people dismiss it as a gimmick, so credibility has to be built through serious operational demonstrations, direct user engagement and practical use-case development. Erica and Tim discuss the importance of the “show me” factor in defence. For novel technology, especially hardware, a pitch deck is rarely enough. Users need to see the capability in realistic conditions, understand what it can and cannot do, and begin to imagine how it could be incorporated into their own concepts of operation. For Gravity, that has meant demonstrating rapid mobility across difficult terrain, maritime boarding scenarios, mountain environments and other situations where moving a person quickly, safely and unpredictably may offer operational value. The episode also explores what dual-use really means when it is more than a label. Gravity has a strong commercial events and entertainment business, while also developing serious defence and security use cases. Tim explains how the two sides of the business support each other without becoming confused, and how the same underlying technology can serve very different customers when the use case is properly understood. For non-traditional suppliers, there are useful lessons throughout. Tim talks about why companies need curiosity, humility and empathy when engaging operational users, why they should avoid assuming they already understand the problem, and why hiring veterans or service leavers can help translate technology into language defence users recognise. Erica also highlights the importance of helping veterans turn deep subject-matter expertise into commercial value. The episode closes with a practical discussion on how companies move from interest to procurement. Tim points to the importance of finding the right user, building a credible champion, understanding funding and contracting routes, and knowing when to be tenacious and when to let the system work through its process. This is a useful listen for defence innovators, dual-use companies, hardware founders, veterans moving into industry, and anyone trying to understand how genuinely novel technology can earn credibility inside defence.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.