Editor’s Brief

Last Week, we looked at Theseus and their Visual Navigation System (VNS) that enables autonomous drone operation in environments where GPS is jammed or unavailable.

This week, we’re headed back across the pond to the look at the London-based deep tech start up Hadean.

As always, your feedback shapes our coverage. Reply directly with insights or questions.

Signal Brief: Hadean — Scaling Synthetic Training for the AI Era

Hadean is a UK software company focused on AI, simulation, and spatial computing for both training and operational planning. The company positions itself within the LVC (live-virtual-constructive) ecosystem as a scalable backend layer that fuses domains and data rather than a closed front-end simulator.

Why it matters: Traditional defense simulators handle hundreds of entities (glorified Risk). Hadean’s distributed architecture supports orders of magnitude more and enables brigade- or division-scale training that includes realistic enemy formations, civilian populations, and infrastructure.

Origins & Vision

Founded in 2015 in London by Rashid Mansoor and Alec Mocatta, Hadean’s original goal was to develop a cloud-native operating system that made massive-scale computing more accessible. In 2018, the team demonstrated the potential of its technology by running a world-record simulation with 6100 concurrent players in a single virtual world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company pivoted to epidemiological simulations, securing a contract with the Francis Crick Institute to model contagion spread. By 2021, Hadean expanded into defense use cases refocusing its platform to create large-scale virtual worlds for military training, mission rehearsal, and wargaming.

The company has since gained significant traction within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), including an Enterprise Agreement worth up to £20 million to deploy its solutions across the British Armed Forces. Hadean also partners with BAE Systems, Palantir, and Thales.

Key Takeaways

• AI-driven realism. LLMs generate realistic civilian “pattern-of-life,” social media reactions, and adaptive OPFOR

• Classified deployment via partners. Partnership with Palantir Technologies integrates Hadean’s product suite directly into the Palantir Foundry platform

• UK MoD adoption. The £20 million MoD Enterprise Agreement Lite establishes a framework allowing any MoD unit to purchase or extend use without new competition.

Tech Radar:

Hadean’s platform enables large-scale, immersive simulations for military training, blending live participants with virtual forces in realistic, evolving scenarios.

• populAI (Synthetic Human Terrain) — A digital wargaming and training engine that procedurally generates scenarios and populates virtual environments with intelligent agents. It creates adaptive opposing forces, civilian populations, and crowds that react autonomously to player actions.

• dominAI (C2 decision support) — A real-time decision-support layer that aggregates existing C2 data feeds into a unified operational picture. It can run forward simulations to compare courses of action and identify optimal decisions under pressure.

Key Capabilities

• Dynamic resource orchestration (sharding & rebalancing)

• Multi-domain integration (air, land, sea, space, cyber in one environment)

• LVC fusion (live gear + virtual 3D simulation + constructive AI forces)

• Flexible deployment (public cloud, private defense cloud, or on-prem; via Foundry for classified use)

• Real-time performance at scale (proven concurrency patterns)

Market Signals

Funding & Growth

• Total Funding: $70.6M across three rounds

• Latest Round: £4M Series A extension (March 2023)

• Notable Investors: Ericsson Ventures, Molten Ventures, Aster Capital, Alumni Ventures, Entrepreneur First, In-Q-Tel, Epic Games, 2050 Capital, and Tencent***

• Valuation: Undisclosed

***Note on China risk: In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense added Tencent to its Section 1260H list (“Chinese military companies”). Given Tencent’s historic investments in Western tech (including Epic Games), this designation raises diligence questions for any portfolio exposure. Public sourcing does not conclusively show whether Tencent has been removed from Hadean’s cap table, so this remains a risk to monitor rather than a settled fact.

Contracts & Government Traction

• UK MoD Enterprise Agreement Lite — £20 million ceiling value agreement (Nov 2024) providing enterprise access to Hadean’s simulation stack.

• British Army CTTP Pathfinder — Collective Training Transformation Programme contract demonstrating cloud-native simulation in austere environments (Kenya deployment).

• DASA AI-Enhanced Army Training — Defence and Security Accelerator contract funding to scale complex synthetic human terrain models.

• JCAST Programme Support — Partnership with MASS Consultants supporting UK Strategic Command’s Joint Command and Staff Training Programme.

• Royal Navy NavyX Collaboration — Supporting maritime autonomous systems training within the Royal Navy’s autonomy and lethality accelerator.

Partners: Janes, Moody’s, Vantor, Palantir, Exonaut, BAE Systems, Thales, Deloitte.

Looking Ahead

U.S. combat forces face a deceptively hard problem: many of today’s leaders learned war in permissive, logistics-rich campaigns where airspace, maritime lanes, and the electromagnetic spectrum were largely uncontested. Those conditions will not exist in a high-end peer conflict.

That doesn’t make the experience irrelevant, but it does mean certain operational assumptions (secure supply lines, uncontested C2, liberal escalation space) may have hardened into institutional bias.

Likewise, the next generation of officers and enlisted leaders who will command in the late 2020s and 2030s, as tensions with China crest, will have limited experience with sustained, complex combat operations.

Our forces continue to build tactical proficiency through MOUT training, large-force exercises, and other skills-based methods. But replicating strategic decision-making under pressure has proven far more elusive.

The PLA also lacks modern combat experience but has invested heavily in large-scale exercises, integrated fires, and logistics resilience. They are also operating in their backyard, a mere 81 miles from Taiwan at the closest point, so maintain something of a “homefield” advantage.

Recent simulations show China capable of inflicting heavy losses even in Allied “victories,” rendering them Pyrrhic. Yet wargame outcomes don’t guarantee real-world results; too many assumptions and variables shape every model.

Traditional tabletop exercises often reduce the fog and friction of operations into rigid “if-then” scripts, essentially a complex version of Risk that fails to capture the feedback loops of modern conflict.

To move beyond static scenarios, militaries need simulations that evolve with the fight.

Instead of scripted red forces, Hadean enables dynamic environments that LVC architectures at scale.

Imagine executing a large force strike on a simulated Chinese vessel with the results instantly feeding back into the wider scenario. Those feedback loops allow commanders to see where assumptions or tactics fail across multiple domains instead of just in the specific training exercise.

Still, war games remain a tool, not a truth machine. Human behavior and leadership judgment are notoriously difficult to model. No algorithm can model Xi Jinping’s calculus or the unpredictable decisions of a field commander facing cascading losses.

But these simulations can expose when our own plans rest on rosy assumptions about friction-less execution. 

Better to uncover those flaws in simulation than on day one of a real war.

Challenges

• U.S. market penetration: Establishing a U.S. subsidiary, navigating clearances, and competing with domestic entrants.

• Platform dependency risk: Over-reliance on a single accredited partner (e.g., Palantir) for classified integration.

• Revenue concentration: Heavy dependence on the MoD Enterprise Agreement; diversification across NATO allies would reduce exposure.

Bottom Line:

Wargames have been a staple of military planning since the 19th century. However the danger lies in mistaking simulations for forecasts. Validation, red-teaming, and after-action reviews must remain human-led.

By scaling complexity, connecting domains, and closing the loop between simulation and doctrine, Hadean offers a way to stress-test strategy before the first shot is fired.  Now it's up to the leadership. 

Can they tolerate the discomfort of failure in simulation long enough to prevent it in reality?

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