An alternative to manually tracking defense tech data
For most people in defense tech, the real 'competitor' to a sourced index isn't another tool — it's doing the work by hand: pulling PitchBook or Crunchbase, cross-checking USAspending and EU program portals, and reconciling it all yourself, one company at a time.
What manual tracking actually costs
Defense tech analysts routinely spend an estimated 5 to 10 hours a week stitching together data from four or more disconnected sources — a generalist VC database for funding, a government portal for contracts, an EU program page for grants, and press coverage for anything more recent than the last database sync. None of those sources link to each other, so the reconciliation work has to happen manually, every time, for every company.
| Dimension | Doing it manually | Defense Tech Atlas |
|---|---|---|
| Sources to check | PitchBook/Crunchbase, USAspending, EU program portals, press releases — separately | One cross-linked index covering founders, funds, contracts, programs, and cap tables |
| Time per diligence pass | Roughly 5–10 hours a week of manual reconciliation, per source | Minutes — the cross-links are already built |
| Connecting a contract to its investors | Manual: look up the company, then separately look up its cap table and funders | One page: company, founders, investors, contracts, and programs are already linked |
| Staying current | Re-checking each source yourself, on your own schedule | Records reviewed on a rolling cadence, with a last-reviewed date and confidence label |
| Traceability | Depends on whether you kept your own notes on where a number came from | Every claim cited inline with a source URL, publication date, and confidence label |
| Cost | No subscription fee, but real analyst time every week | $49/month Pro tier, $999/month Enterprise |
The index does the cross-referencing once
Defense Tech Atlas doesn't replace the underlying public sources — it does the cross-referencing work once, keeps it current on a rolling review cadence, and cites every figure back to where it came from, so the same diligence pass that used to take hours takes minutes.