A Look at Defence Investing: Funding from Asia

As it becomes more and more important to find and fund cutting edge technologies, we see countries turning to the venture capitalist route. Singapore is one of those countries and today we’ll look at the fund established there and how it helps defence and security innovators.

Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), is very involved in defence and security research and development at universities in the region through Temasek Laboratories at both the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

They have now gone one step further to help bring to market innovative ideas that can be used in Singapore’s defence initiatives and have therefore set up a technology innovation fund. This fund is administered by Cap Vista, a strategic partner of the Global Security Challenge competition.

DSTA committed S$20 million to invest in early-stage technology startups around the globe (capped at around $2 million per investment). The current portfolio companies from the website of CapVista are:

• Ascendent Technologies Pte Ltd, a Singapore registered company, was formed in March 2007. It specializes in the research and development of CERMET (metal infused ceramics) processing technology, and the subsequent performance and packaging customisation for armour system integrators. It aims to be a key global supplier and consultants for advanced protection materials


• DenseLight owns and operates an indium phosphite-based manufacturing facility, with the ability to design, manufacture, package and test photonics devices. These devices are used in a wide range of sensors such as fibre-optic gyroscopes, chemical sensors and remote sensing devices.


• Rosum Corporation is based in Mountain View, Silicon Valley. It is a location technology company in the business of augmenting traditional GPS solutions through the integration of TV-based positioning systems. Rosum TV-GPS, provides reliable and accurate position fixes indoors, outdoors, and in dense urban locations where GPS signals are completely denied.

As you can tell via the investments above, you don’t need to be in Singapore or even in Asia to get an investment from CapVista. In fact they have built a robust network centered on partnerships around the world and have established Defence Technology Offices (DTO) in the US and Europe. So if you are in Europe, fear not! the DTO (Europe) office is located in Paris. This office helps to organize and build links in places such as France, Sweden, and the UK. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the last few years DSTA was the third largest defence R&D partner after Germany and the UK.