Parkwalk portfolio company Mind Foundry was featured in Tech Funding News. See the excerpt below or the full article here.
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.
Read the full article on Tech Funding News here.
Find out more about Mind Foundry on our Portfolio page.