Arondite
Solving Human-Machine Teaming
Details
The Founders
Two defence veterans on a mission to connect autonomy.
Will Blyth, CEO graduated top of his class at Sandhurst, earning the prestigious Sword of Honour, before serving in the UK Military and the UK Ministry of Defence. He later joined Palantir and Helsing, gaining deep insight into the application of advanced technologies in national security.
Rob Underhill, CTO spent a decade as an engineer at BAE Systems before becoming the founding engineer at Garrison, where he scaled the team to 170 people. Alongside this, he served as a military reservist, deploying to the Middle East.
Together, their rare mix of frontline military leadership and deep technical expertise — honed across Palantir, Helsing, BAE Systems, and Garrison — uniquely positions them to tackle the challenges of safe human-machine collaboration
What Others Missed...
What we saw when others couldn’t
When we first met Will and Rob in 2023, the broader market wasn’t talking about European defence with urgency (which was to be expected). To many, the category looked opaque, competitive and riddled with procurement complexity. But to us, the teams conviction was unmistakable: the battlefield was becoming fragmented, autonomous systems were proliferating, and lives depended on getting the integration right.
Where others saw red tape, we saw founder-market fit. Their track record of exceptionalism; from Will’s Sandhurst Sword of Honour and MoD procurement insight, to Rob’s scaling journey with Garrison — gave us confidence they could execute. They spoke not about slide decks, but about lived experience and a vision to solve autonomy’s most critical problem: trust and safety
The Breakthrough
In 2024, Concept invested in Arondite's $2.25M pre-seed co-led by Concept Ventures and Creator Fund. By early 2025, they had raised a $10M Seed round led by Index Ventures, bringing total funding to over $12M.
Their platform began rolling out with defence and critical infrastructure partners.Early deployments demonstrated real-world use cases from minefield clearance to counter-intrusion, proving the potential of their AI-enabled “connective tissue” approach.
Where They Are Now
As of mid-2025, Arondite is assembling one of Europe's most talent dense defence, security, and critical infrastructure companies. Their software platform is built around the core 'Cobalt' machine, a piece of technology that is hardware-agnostic, designed to unify autonomous systems and act as a data layer for oversight, analytics, and operational efficiency.
What’s Next
For Will and Rob, the opportunity is vast. Defence organisations, governments, and critical industries are leaning into autonomy, but safe collaboration requires trust, transparency, and human control. Arondite is on track to define this new category; ensuring autonomy scales in a way that reflects the values it’s meant to protect.
For us, Arondite is a reminder of why we back founders at the beginning, long before others believe or see.
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