How Rebellion Defence used NCSC For Startups to accelerate product development

Rebellion Defence is a British-American startup that builds AI products for the defence and security needs of the UK, US and their allies. Its co-founders, including myself, have decades of experience working for the government, we count former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt as a board member and we are classed as a ‘unicorn’ (a startup that’s worth $1bn or more).

Rebellion Defence has been completely single-minded about its target audience from the outset, and has designed its product suite around the national security needs of the US and UK governments. But as the company honed its products, I knew that we needed something else; insights and input from the security staff who would be using it.

Rebellion Defence joined NCSC For Startups because I wanted experts from the government who understood real-world challenges to test and probe our assumptions. Through product demos and conversations with technical architects at the NCSC, the programme has enabled Rebellion Defence’s core product to develop at a rate that wouldn’t have been possible without NCSC For Startups.

As a result, Rebellion Defence adapted its product roadmap mid-way through the programme. Initially we thought that highlighting the detail of known vulnerabilities in critical national security systems would be valuable enough, but after speaking to the NCSC’s technical architects, we realised that for the product to be truly useful, it also had to help filter the threats according to their likely impact and priority. This added layer would give security teams a crucial first step; information to help them decide what to patch first.

Our founding philosophy is one of user-centred design. We needed access to users to make our products beneficial for technical architects and people working within security systems. What we gained from NCSC For Startups was unparalleled access to skilled users. Not only the technical architects, but the operators and the people within the NCSC with a depth of knowledge.

Having been through the programme, the team at Rebellion Defence are using a recent funding injection to grow the engineering team, and we’re looking close to home for the best talent. The quality of software engineering talent in the UK is exceptional and that’s partly why we operate here. That's not only due to the existing tech companies that have been here for quite some time (like DeepMind), but also the quality of graduates coming out of the computer science departments in British universities. They remain world class.

Oliver Lewis,
Co-Founder, Rebellion Defence