Oxford Dynamics has been selected to feature in the inaugural edition of DSEI Gateway's Tech Quarterly series, for its innovative agentic AI platform – ‘AVIS’. 

Oxford Dynamics, established in 2020, has seen a raft of recent successes as it continues to cultivate an ecosystem of products based on innovative hardware-agnostic AI.  

The company was set up by co-founders Shefali Sharma, Dr Edward Jackson, and Mike Lawton, the serial entrepreneur also behind Oxford Space Systems and Oxlabs.  

In the five years since, the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) has grown to around 30 staff, boasting PhD-level expertise in computer science, AI, and robotics.  

In that time, the company has received grants from the UK’s Defence and Security Accelerator, support from the UK Defence AI Centre, and interactions with the UK Defence Security Technology Laboratory, which Jackson told DSEI Gateway “helped the company bridge the valley of death”. 

At present, the ecosystem includes Oxford Dynamics’ AVIS – an AI decision support tool – and the Strider modular robot platform, an AI-enabled robot for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) incidents. In particular, the robot supports incident response and explosive ordinance detection and neutralisation.  

Oxford Dynamics’ CBRN Strider modular robot. (Oxford Dynamics) 

The company achieved a major milestone in 2024, when it became the first in the UK to secure an enterprise-lite agreement with the UK Ministry of Defence under the Defence Tech Scaler initiative, launched by the UK Government as part of its ‘engine for growth’ package.  

This recognised Oxford Dynamics as a trusted provider of defence technology, allowing it to go on to secure additional contracts based on its growing capabilities.  

It paved the way for the company to support the team behind the UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review, which last summer invited the public, industry, and allies to provide input and suggestions on the future direction of the armed forces  

AVIS helped support this by sifting through over 8,000 documents and responses from 1,700 contributors, working with US technology company Palantir. Describing the partnership, Jackson said that “it was a good example of a sovereign SME and a global prime working side-by-side – not in competition, but in complement – to support national objectives”. 

During the SDR review process, AVIS provided “accelerated insight generation while enabling analysts and [the SDR’s] reviewers to focus on higher-order reading, decision making, and judgment”, Jackson said.   

Diving deeper into the specifics of the contract, Jackson said that “AVIS operated in a secure, air-gapped environment and produced fully traceable outputs – every conclusion it delivered could be verified back to its source material. That transparency was key for something as sensitive and high-profile as the SDR.” 

This represented the first time AI was used as part of a major UK Government review and is a key reason why Oxford Dynamics was chosen for this inaugural edition of DSEI Gateway’s Tech Quarterly. 

Following the SDR contract, the company secured investment from BAE Systems. The first stage of the partnership – which was announced in August – will see Oxford Dynamics’ AVIS integrated into BAE Systems’ PropheSEA platform, which is designed to connect disparate sources of data, improving efficiency and reducing costs of complex asset management. 

“In the longer term, the collaboration will enable the integration of Oxford Dynamics’ capabilities across BAE Systems’ extensive portfolio”, according to a BAE Systems press release. 

Commenting on the investment, Jackson said that “working with BAE Systems gives us the platform to quickly scale our technology into systems that will make a real difference to our armed forces.” 

This new partnership with BAE Systems and the SDR contract, working alongside Palantir, demonstrates an impressive amount of collaboration with major defence companies for such a young SME.  

Amid these high-profile successes, DSEI Gateway asked the company about the hurdles it has faced in the past five years.  

Co-founder Shefali Sharma explained that having access to high-quality, real-world data is essential to effectively understand and deliver end-user needs.  

For small companies, though, this is often a notable bottleneck as they are unable to access large reams of government data, given its classifications.  

This is where the partnership with BAE Systems will bring significant benefits. 

Secondly, Sharma said that the ability to wield large-scale compute power will be a challenge for all companies, not just small firms like Oxford Dynamics, and the military.  

Sensor-decider-effector systems – like the UK’s planned Digital Targeting Web – for example will need large amounts of computing power to handle all the data coming from a slew of sensors.  

The defence secretary’s commitment to deliver SDR recommendations and the delivery of a sovereign cloud – now under contract – is encouraging, but there is still a long road ahead to deliver deterrence and warfighting readiness.  

In spite of these sector-wide problems, the company’s focus on human-machine interaction and its positioning as a creator of sovereign UK capability have helped make it stand out, Sharma explained. 

Going forward, Sharma said that the company is working on several projects in the defence sector, but as a dual-use company, they can apply their solutions in other high-value, highly regulated sectors such as finance, pharmaceuticals and insurance. 

Jackson explained that “we follow where this mission leads”, noting that “the beauty of what we’ve built is that it can apply to so many different sectors”.  
 

What is Tech Quarterly? 

Tech Quarterly is an initiative by DSEI Gateway designed to highlight the innovations of micro and small and medium-sized enterprises often overlooked in the defence sector. Each edition showcases one company which has demonstrated originality in addressing a significant defence problem through technological innovation.