Sometimes, the hardest decision a leader can make is the one that sets a company up for the long run. Lindsay Chadwick just so happened to make hers soon after becoming chief executive of Mind Foundry in late 2025.
The company, founded by University of Oxford professors Stephen Roberts and Maike Osborne in 2016, had spent the better part of a decade taking their machine-learning research into insurance, infrastructure and defence.
Among its longest-standing backers is university spinout investor Parkwalk, which invested at founding through the University of Oxford Innovation Fund II, returned through its Opportunities Fund in 2017 and 2019, and joined the company’s $13.6M Series A in 2020.
When Chadwick took the helm, her job was to set the direction of the business, and that meant cutting three sectors down to one.
“We made a deliberate decision to concentrate the company on defence and national security,” Chadwick tells Tech Funding News, adding that the move came down to “the combination of mission, technical fit and national need.”
It was no easy call, she explains, but it was necessary to put the company’s people, products and money behind the area where it had “the strongest right to win”.
Today, Mind Foundry’s software helps people make sense of data from sonar, radar and other sensors, so they can spot threats earlier and decide faster, with a human still making the call.
The timing has, so far, worked in its favour. While Mind Foundry was reshaping its focus, Britain’s defence policy was moving in the same direction. And now, the money is starting to follow, with the government setting out £298bn of defence investment over the next four years.
Investors are moving too, with UK and European defence tech startups having raised $12.3B by late June, almost double the previous year.
The hardest call to make
Chadwick started her career as a lawyer, guiding fast-growing, venture-backed businesses and university spinouts through their various life stages. She later worked with the founding team of ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency.
That experience, she points out, gave her what she describes as “a close view of what it takes to turn ambitious science into organisations that can deliver real-world impact.”
Running the company herself, however, brought what she considers to be the hardest call of her tenure so far.
“Choosing to concentrate the business meant accepting that we could not pursue every opportunity and making difficult decisions that affected talented people who had contributed a great deal to the company,” she says.
The team’s response, she adds, made the decision feel right. More than half of Mind Foundry’s staff invested their own money when the company was reshaped, including former colleagues and friends who had already moved on.
“That support was a powerful vote of confidence in our direction and in the company’s future,” Chadwick says. “Leadership sometimes means choosing clarity over comfort”.
Listening beneath the waves
When every ship, submarine and surveillance system in modern defence relies on sensors, that clarity has a very specific target. Between them, Chadwick explains, the systems that see and listen produce a flood of information that needs to be pieced together and understood fast.
That task can also be toughest at sea. Underwater sound can be hard to read alone, and operators listening for threats can be swamped by the volume of it. It is a strain Chadwick describes as “a significant cognitive burden.”
“Essentially, Mind Foundry builds the layer between those sensors, the platforms and the people making decisions,” she says.
Its flagship product, NIGHTINGALE, was tested alongside the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy and Thales to reduce the time operators need to sort through possible contacts.
It uses machine learning to help sonar operators separate meaningful sounds from background noise and work out which deserve attention first. A sister product, SENTRY, combines feeds from several sensors into a single picture.
The same approach could also help guard the cables and pipelines that run beneath British waters, at a time when concern over their security is growing.
“The purpose of our technology is not to remove people from decision-making,” Chadwick points out. “It is to reduce cognitive load, surface what matters and help people make faster, better-informed decisions while retaining human control.”
Building in Britain
Chadwick is firm on where that technology should come from. “Defence AI is not simply another piece of software,” she says.
Tools like Mind Foundry’s handle and draw on sensitive information, she argues, and there is a need for regular updating long after they are first switched on.
Keeping that work in British hands, in her view, keeps the country in charge of its own security. “The UK must understand and control the technology on which critical decisions depend,” she adds.
With defence spending on the rise, she sees the current moment as an opening for companies like hers, and a sign that the market Mind Foundry committed to years ago is the right one.
The Defence Investment Plan includes a new £200M AI investment fund, on top of the £1.6B UK Defence Innovation fund set aside through 2030 to find the next major British defence company.
“It creates a significant opportunity, but the important question is how quickly ambition turns into deployed capability,” she says.
This article is part of our editorial partnership with Parkwalk, leading UK investors focused on university spinouts and deep tech innovation.
