Today, I sat down with Andrew Roughan, the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of Defence Holdings, the UK’s first listed Sovereign AI defence company.
Andrew brings a decade of experience leading Plexal, one of the UK’s most active government-aligned innovation organisations, alongside a founding role at Here East, the Olympic legacy technology campus.
We explored what drew him to the role, what he found when he got under the bonnet, and how much of the company’s published Operating Model reflects his own strategic thinking versus the foundations laid by CTO Andy McCartney and the founding team.
We then went deep on the company’s operational progress, covering Project STRONG, the recently published MOD transparency notice confirming a direct contract award worth £226,000 for a sovereign agentic decision support prototype, and what the pathway from a three month testing engagement to follow-on deployment actually looks like.
We also revisited Project Ixian, the company’s inaugural AI product built natively on Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped, its demonstration at NATO Task Force Maven Industry Day at SHAPE headquarters, and where the two classified MOD applications described by the CTO late last year currently stand.
The conversation then turned to the broader Defence Holdings ecosystem, including the Accelerator programme, the IMSL delivery partnership, Oracle’s role as Hyperscale Cloud Partner and the OM Defence Systems arrangement which combines revenue participation with a strategic equity position.
We also discussed the government’s newly announced £1.1 billion AI Hardware Plan, including the national AI supercomputer and British Business Bank fund, and where Defence Holdings positions itself within that wider sovereign AI investment landscape.
I closed by asking Andrew about the Palantir comparison and what Defence Holdings may look like in five years.
For investors trying to calibrate what the MOD announcement actually means for the company’s long term trajectory, this is essential listening.
Tune in!
