Public funding does not often produce such a clean growth story, but Vizgard comes close. According to the GOV.UK case study, the London SME has used backing from UK Defence Innovation, alongside technical support from Dstl, to move from early-stage software development into venture-backed expansion and overseas testing. That matters because the commercial question is bigger than drones. Vizgard, founded by former Royal Navy submariner Alex Kehoe, is building software that helps customers make better use of visual data in demanding security settings without replacing their existing camera systems. For a small British firm, that is the sort of proposition that can travel well if the financing arrives at the right moment.

The company’s main platform, FortifAI, is best understood as a labour-saving product rather than a pure defence technology story. It sits on top of existing camera infrastructure across land, air and sea and automates the repetitive work of spotting, tracking and identifying objects across multiple live feeds. The original focus included helping police drone operations beyond visual line of sight. For customers, the attraction is fairly direct. Operators do not need to stare at every screen every second and hope they catch the right movement at the right time. For Vizgard, that makes the sales pitch much clearer. Buyers are paying for faster detection and less pressure on staff, not for AI as a fashionable label.

The most useful part of the UKDI Security Open Call was not publicity. It was runway. Kehoe said the company had to rebuild the software so it could manage several visual streams at once, rather than handling one camera feed for one drone. That work pushed FortifAI from prototype territory into a product a customer can actually deploy at scale. The GOV.UK case study says the platform moved on to handling dozens of concurrent streams and now more than 100. This is a familiar financing gap for UK SMEs: the idea has promise, but the engineering needed to make it robust is expensive, and private investors do not always want to fund that stage first.

Vizgard’s first commercial break came in 2021, when UKDI gave the business its first contract. According to the GOV.UK case study, that work included sea trials on the Royal Navy’s uncrewed test submarine, where Vizgard combined radio data with visual AI to identify vessels concealing their identity and to track fast-moving craft automatically. For a young company, that kind of validation matters almost as much as the contract value. It gave Vizgard a live operating reference and, by Kehoe’s account, helped open doors with larger coastal security contractors. Public procurement did two jobs at once: it funded development and gave the company proof that its software could perform outside the lab.

Since then, the addressable market has widened. UK policing is exploring the software for both drone operations and counter-drone work, where missed visual cues can quickly become an operational issue. The system tracks friendly assets while also scanning for other aerial objects, cutting the chance that a human observer misses something while watching the wrong feed. The business effect shows up in the staffing numbers. Vizgard had about five employees when it first started working with UKDI. It now has 20. That is still small by defence industry standards, but it is a meaningful shift for an SME trying to deepen engineering capacity, pursue larger contracts and build a business that is not dependent on a single customer.

Private capital has followed public backing rather than replacing it. In early 2025, Vizgard secured £1.5 million in venture capital, giving the company room to build UnifAI, a machine learning operations platform designed to reduce AI model improvement cycles from weeks to days, including for users without deep technical expertise. That widens the commercial opportunity. Instead of selling only one operational tool, Vizgard is building a broader software offer around deployment and model maintenance. The export angle is already visible as well. The GOV.UK case study says the company is field testing the technology with the US Marines through a Defence Innovation Unit contract, which is the sort of overseas proof point that can matter far more than a domestic pilot on its own.

The latest signal of momentum is market access. According to the GOV.UK case study, Vizgard has secured a place in NATO DIANA’s 2026 cohort for autonomous and unmanned technologies, one of 150 companies selected from more than 3,500 applicants. Back in the UK, it is also working with Dstl on edge-based AI to help quadcopter drones identify unexploded mines during automated ISR missions. Kehoe’s assessment of the funding model is straightforward: the projects were fully funded, the application process was serious without being excessive, and the work stayed tied to genuine user problems. For Market Pulse UK readers, that is the bigger commercial lesson. Well-timed public money can help a specialist British SME cross the gap from prototype to product, attract venture investment, hire staff and start selling abroad.