When defense industry leaders gathered for the infamous "Last Supper" in 1993, they consolidated around a simple principle: build bigger platforms, integrate them vertically, and control the entire system. That model worked for an era when defense meant aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and missile systems—physical platforms that took decades to build and generations to replace.
Today's defense landscape looks radically different.
The "system" is no longer a monolithic platform. It's data flowing across allied networks, AI models training on classified intelligence, autonomous swarms coordinating in contested environments, and coalition partners collaborating across security domains in real-time. The convergence of AI breakthroughs, procurement reform, and intensifying geopolitical tensions hasn't just accelerated defense innovation, it has fundamentally changed what we're defending and how we fight.
TLDR: it’s all about the data.
This is why Virtru is highlighted in Bessemer's 2026 Defense Tech Roadmap alongside autonomous systems pioneers and advanced manufacturing innovators. While those companies are revolutionizing what gets deployed, Virtru is solving an equally critical challenge: ensuring the data that powers these systems can be shared securely, controlled granularly, and trusted completely, even in the most contested and denied environments.
Every frontier highlighted in Bessemer's roadmap, from autonomous systems to AI-enhanced workflows, from resilient edge networks to advanced manufacturing, shares a common dependency: they run on data. Lots of it. Flowing across boundaries that didn't exist in the Last Supper era.
Consider the modern battlefield reality:
The Last Supper platform model can't solve these problems. You can't vertically integrate data flows across allied nations. You can't build a proprietary platform that encompasses all coalition partners. You can't wait 24 months for an acquisition cycle to grant data access to a new mission partner.
The Next Breakfast demands something fundamentally different: data-centric security that travels with the data itself, regardless of where it flows, who accesses it, and what systems process it.
Virtru's innovation centers on three breakthrough capabilities that directly enable the defense tech transformation described in Bessemer's roadmap:
Traditional perimeter-based security assumes you can build walls around classified networks and control what goes in and out. This model collapses the moment data needs to move: to an allied partner, to an edge device, to an AI training environment, across classification boundaries, or even across public cloud providers.
Virtru's Trusted Data Format (TDF) fundamentally inverts this paradigm. Instead of securing the perimeter, TDF wraps cryptographic controls and policy enforcement around the data object itself. The data carries its own security policy, access controls, and audit trail, whether it's on a server in a SCIF, in an encrypted email to an allied nation, or feeding into an AI model at the tactical edge.
This isn't just a better way to secure data; it's the only way to secure data in a world where autonomous systems coordinate across vendor ecosystems, where AI workflows span classification boundaries, and where coalition partners need real-time access to intelligence without 18-month SIDA agreements.
As procurement reform accelerates and the DoW prioritizes "speed and outcomes over process," data-centric security becomes the enabler. Warfighters can move much faster at the application layer because the data layer is secured by design, with cryptographic controls that persist regardless of which system processes it.
One of the most persistent bottlenecks in defense operations is the air-gap between classification levels and allied systems. Moving data from JWICS to SIPR to coalition networks has historically required manual processes, physical media transfers, and cross domain guard solutions that take weeks to configure and introduce single points of failure.
Modern warfare doesn't allow for this friction. When autonomous swarms coordinate with manned platforms, when AI-enhanced targeting feeds from edge sensors to tactical commanders, when allied partners need real-time intelligence on fast-moving threats: you can't wait for data to be "downgraded" through a manual guard solution.
Virtru's Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF) and support for ACP 240 (the FVEY standard for cross-domain data sharing) enable controlled, auditable data flows across security boundaries in near real-time. Data can move from a U.S. classified network to a coalition partner's system with cryptographic controls intact, attribute-based access policies enforced, and complete provenance tracking maintained.
Perhaps the most strategic capability Virtru brings to the Next Breakfast is persistent control. Even after data has been shared with an ally, deployed to an edge system, or processed by an AI model, the data owner maintains the ability to audit access, revoke permissions, and enforce policy changes in real-time.
This matters profoundly for coalition operations. European allies are rapidly increasing defense spending (projected to grow 3.4x over six years), but they're also increasingly concerned about data sovereignty and protection of their intelligence sources. The ability to share data with U.S. systems while maintaining sovereign control over who accesses it, how it's used, and the ability to revoke access if mission parameters change is a strategic enabler for alliance cohesion.
Consider the operational reality: a European partner shares intelligence on adversary movements with U.S. autonomous systems operating in their territorial waters. With Virtru's approach, they can grant access to specific mission systems, audit exactly how that data is used, and revoke access if political circumstances change all without breaking the data flow or requiring manual intervention.
This isn't just a technical capability; it's a diplomatic and strategic tool that makes allies more willing to share sensitive intelligence because they maintain sovereign control even after sharing.
The capital markets are validating that defense innovation can scale alongside legacy primes—Palantir's 65x NTM revenue multiple demonstrates that the market rewards platforms that become foundational to how defense operates in the 21st century.
Virtru occupies a similar category-defining position in data security. Just as Palantir became the operating system for data integration and analysis, Virtru is becoming the foundational layer for how sensitive data moves, shares, and operates in zero-trust, multi-domain environments.
The total addressable market extends far beyond traditional defense IT budgets:
More importantly, as procurement reform accelerates and Silicon Valley's relationship with defense fundamentally shifts, Virtru enables both trends. Tech companies can bring commercial AI/ML innovation to defense use cases because Virtru provides the data security layer that allows classified and sensitive data to flow into those systems safely. Procurement can move at startup speed because data-centric security reduces the compliance burden and security review timelines that have historically slowed acquisition.
The Last Supper created a defense industrial base optimized for building large, integrated platforms over decades-long timelines. It worked brilliantly for its era.
The Next Breakfast is being built by companies creating the infrastructure for a fundamentally different paradigm—one where data flows across boundaries at machine speed, where AI and autonomy demand access to massive datasets, where coalition partners operate as integrated forces despite different security architectures, and where startup innovation cycles happen in months, not decades.
In this new paradigm, data-centric security isn't a feature or a compliance requirement. It's foundational infrastructure—as critical as the networks that carry data, the clouds that process it, and the AI models that learn from it.
This is why Virtru appears on Bessemer's Defense Tech Roadmap. Not because it's building a better firewall or a faster encryption algorithm, but because it's solving the fundamental challenge that enables every other innovation in the modern defense stack: how do you make data secure enough to share and controlled enough to trust, at the speed of software and the scale of global operations?
The companies that answer foundational questions like this don't just succeed in defense tech—they define what's possible for an entire generation of innovation.
Welcome to the Next Breakfast. Virtru is setting the table.