Booz Allen's venture arm goes across the pond for its newest investment

Booz Allen Hamilton’s venture capital arm for backing startup technology companies has made its first investment outside of the U.S., but still one with an eye toward opportunities in the government market here.

Hadean is headquartered in the U.K., London to be exact, and opened for business in 2015 to specialize in digital wargaming and command-and-control tools for training and simulation initiatives. Artificial intelligence is core to Hadean’s development efforts aimed at providing operators representations of the real world.

Hadean said Wednesday that Booz Allen Ventures joined Entrepreneurs First, Twin Track Ventures and British Business Bank in a bridge investment round intended to create a pathway toward a Series B capital raise. Twin Track Partners is linked to the NATO Innovation Fund, which the alliance set up to invest in promising tech startups.

In 2022, Hadean fetched $30 million in Series A capital from several investors including the U.S. intelligence community’s In-Q-Tel arm for backing startups.

“This funding brings together investors who deeply understand defence, sovereignty, and what it takes to scale mission-critical technology,” Hadean’s co-founder and chief executive Craig Beddis said in a release. “Their collective support enables us to accelerate delivery for the UK, the US, an allied NATO partners at a time when operational readiness and technological advantage matter more than ever.”

A bulk of the bridge investment dollars will go toward efforts at accelerating and deepening deployments with the U.S. and U.K. militaries, as well as looking at future deployments for NATO and allied missions.

Booz Allen and Hadean have collaborated on tech development efforts for the past two years, including offerings for synthetic mission rehearsals. The companies will continue to work on joint solution development involving agentic, physical and spatial AI for training.

Hadean is also eyeing broader use of its tech across the civil, intelligence, infrastructure and national security sectors.

From the U.K. perspective, that country’s government has called for a new defense tech unicorn to emerge there and follow a similar path of growth that Uforce has pursued. Investors typically use the $1 billion touted valuation figure as a benchmark for determining a company is a unicorn.

UForce said Thursday it crossed that $1 billion mark after collecting $50 million in new capital to aid the next phase of its strategy to develop unmanned systems for military operations. CEO Oleg Rogynskyy and Oleksii Honcharuk co-founded UForce in 2022.