Data-driven reports on the companies, capital, contracts, technology, and talent shaping defense tech — from the team that recruits inside it.
Data on who’s actually hiring in defense tech.
Across 81 defense tech companies founded since 2023, up to a third of first-year hires had already worked alongside a founder — same employer, overlapping dates. By year four it is about one in thirty. Roughly twelve times what chance would produce. These 81 companies only, not a sector wide sample.
Every open role at 75 defense and national security companies, pulled straight from their applicant tracking systems. Half of a given week’s postings are gone within seven weeks, only 18.9% of new roles are software, and 58% name no clearance at all. These 75 employers only, not a sector wide sample.
We tracked $34.3B of venture equity into 395 defense-tech companies over two years and split it by what those companies build. In six of ten domains, three companies hold roughly 90% of all capital raised. In five, a single company holds more than 70%. Space and aerospace is the only domain where capital is genuinely distributed, and it is also the largest.
We traced 2,751 hardware-engineering hires at 35 defense-tech manufacturers over the trailing 12 months, adjusting for company size to find who actually feeds hardware talent. Commercial-space firms like Vast and Rocket Lab over-index by roughly 22 to 38 times their size; the legacy primes split; Big Tech barely registers. Every feeder figure carries its observed hire count and a 95% interval.
We traced 956 software hires at nine of defense tech's fastest-hiring names — Anduril, Palantir, ICEYE and more — adjusting for company size to find who really over-indexes as a feeder. Amazon does; the legacy primes split unevenly, and about 1 in 5 hires already did a defense tour.
Sourcing, and selling the mission, is exactly the search we run.