UK launched Defense Innovation Unit variant after pressure from Pete Hegseth
Christian Garrett · Winning the AI Race & Reindustrialization | Christian Garrett, 137 Ventures · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Jul 27, 2025 · at 5:23
Christian Garrett of 137 Ventures discusses defense procurement innovation and US-UK defense tech cooperation.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The UK adopted a DIU variant and launched their own with I think about million pounds to start in a matter of months. The story apparently is that it was actually Secretary Hexeth who was pushing them that they should do this, and Minister of Defense Healy got it done.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Christian Garrett
Garrett: Defense tech is currently overrated in venture capital
“What's, what's overrated? And I would say it was overrated actually is defense tech.”
Government must subsidize mining prices before private capital will invest
“If the government can support kind of a critical problem here in subsidized pricing and help create a market, right? Like there's no price, there's no market that exists right now here because you don't have the ability to get to critical scale... Basically yo…”
Garrett: A wave of tech IPOs will begin in 2025 and continue through 2026
“And I think you'll see a wave companies going out starting this year and continuing through next year.”
Garrett: Defense tech value will accrue to a few winner-take-all companies
“It's not like enterprise software where there's going to be hundreds of great companies that go after a multi-trillion dollar TAM in defense tech, multi-trillion dollar TAM, but I think it's gonna be a much smaller number of companies where all the value accru…”
Garrett: US will win second Cold War by partnering with tech
“If you look, you know, backdrop, we're in a second cold war during the first court war, we won because of our technological industrial prowess and government was a huge partner to the tech industry and really was helped fund the beginnings of the tech industry…”
Garrett: European breakout startups face fewer venture-backed clones than US winners
“When you build a winner, you don't have what you have in the U S which is like, once there's a large, massive winner and outcome in the U S there's like 20 startups that get funded to go compete. Right. And Europe, it's not like that. The capital market is not…”