Digital Catapult has announce five startups that have been selected to join its Defence Testbed Accelerator programme, aimed at strengthening industrial supply chain resilience in the defence sector and driving the practical application of deep tech innovation. The initiative seeks to make the UK’s defence industry future-ready by addressing secure data-sharing challenges and enabling faster, more agile additive manufacturing (AM) across the supply chain.
Delivered as part of the Made Smarter | Digital Supply Chain Hub, the accelerator brings together the Ministry of Defence (MoD), major defence manufacturers, and UK-based small businesses. It will also draw on expertise from the
National Composites Centre (NCC) and the
Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) to unlock new opportunities for securely managing and sharing manufacturing design data.
The UK defence sector currently faces long lead times for securing military assets and fragmented data systems that disrupt supply chains and threaten operational readiness. To tackle these issues, the MoD is exploring ways to create a federated digital inventory of manufacturing information, giving authorised partners a single, secure view of essential technical data and enabling distributed 3-D printing of defence components.
The five participating startups will work on two challenges to validate and trial new solutions.
Dataline Labs,
CamyPro and
TECHNIA will focus on the Technical Data Packs (TDP) — Digital Inventory Connectors challenge, developing software to securely extract and standardise metadata from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems.
Vistory Group and
Quaisr will address the Federated Digital Inventory challenge, considering how best to develop a unified, permissioned platform for viewing and sharing technical data across the supply chain.
Supply chain resilienceBoth challenges aim to bolster industrial supply chain resilience, building on Digital Catapult’s track record in this space. To date, the Digital Supply Chain Hub has delivered 37 projects and engaged with 135 manufacturing and technology SMEs, representing a 44% year-on-year increase. Companies involved have secured more than £6 million in funding since joining the programme, underlining its role in helping businesses commercialise solutions and scale.
Annie Iakovaki, head of industrial supply chains at Digital Catapult, said: “One area of defence innovation that requires immediate attention is the supply chain, responsible for the delivery of assets, information and people that underpin the success of the UK defence sector. Interventions like this accelerator programme demonstrate the value of convening capabilities across the sector, and bridging the gap between industry, startups and Government to better solve some of the most pressing challenges in the space, and to unlock new opportunities that maintain the UK’s position as a leading player in defence innovation and success.”
Richard Hamber, AM lead in defence support at the National Armaments Director Group, said: “This is an exciting moment in the evolution of the ideas stated in the MoD’s recently issued Advanced Manufacturing Strategy. The testbed provides the basis to bring to life some of those ideas so we can see the art of the possible and understand the next steps to make them a reality. The Catapults have provided energy, pace and buckets of expertise to get us this far very quickly while adding another five small and medium-size enterprises (SME) into the Defence sphere, consistent with wider Governmental objectives, and the Defence Industrial Strategy.”