Defense contractor insurance for startups — COI-ready before your contract deadline.

For a defense startup, the crown jewels are code and design data — and adversary states and competitors know exactly where to find them. Across this cohort that means hypersonic and warhead design data, autonomy source and model weights, and sensor and targeting IP, much of it inside teams as small as two to nine people with early-stage security maturity. A single intrusion can exfiltrate the entire competitive moat and, where US contracts and controlled data are involved, trigger reporting duties, contract loss, and False Claims exposure — while off-the-shelf cyber policies exclude nation-state "acts of war" and sublimit trade-secret loss. RiskCube structures Cyber with regulatory-defense cover and negotiated state-actor carve-backs so the breach response and compliance fallout are financed rather than excluded.

Autonomous perception and targeting software is now the beating heart of the modern defense platform — and its single largest uninsured exposure. Nearly every company in this cohort puts an algorithm in a decisive loop: interceptors and turrets that decide at machine speed whether to engage, one-way-attack drones that steer themselves onto targets, and perception systems that reconstruct or detect the picture that cues a response — so a single misclassification means a wrong engagement, a missed threat, or a collision. Resulting wrongful-harm and economic-loss claims run into the millions, yet standard Tech E&O excludes bodily injury and CGL excludes weapons, war and "algorithmic-decision" failures, leaving the loss unfunded. RiskCube places Technology E&O with affirmative AI/algorithm wording coordinated with a product-liability tower, so an autonomy failure is paid rather than denied.

Almost every defense-article maker is one licensing misstep away from a company-ending enforcement action. The exposure is structural and cross-jurisdictional: US-headquartered firms with overseas manufacturing, foreign-registered developers operating from the US, companies under a foreign export regime, and the hiring of foreign-national engineers all create unlicensed technical-data-disclosure risk. ITAR and EAR export-control violations carry criminal liability, seven-figure fines, and debarment that severs the government revenue the company is built on — and fines and penalties are uninsurable as a matter of public policy. RiskCube cannot insure the penalty, but places D&O with regulatory-investigation cover to fund defense costs and pairs clients with the compliance-program discipline — technology control plan, registration, foreign-person access controls — that keeps the exposure from ever maturing.

In early defense hardware, breaking prototypes is not an accident — it is the development method, and it is routinely uninsured. Companies in this cohort destroy rockets and airframes in static fires and live-flight tests, expect to lose fragile stratospheric aircraft on test flights, risk hand-built submersibles on sea trials, and have founders personally diving unproven life-support rigs. Standard property and inland-marine forms exclude items "undergoing testing" and experimental craft, so a one-off prototype with no market value — and any injured test crew — lands straight on a pre-revenue balance sheet. RiskCube arranges prototype / hull and marine cover with test-flight and R&D-in-progress extensions, plus Workers' Comp and Defense Base Act for test personnel, converting an expected write-off into a recoverable one.

The moment a defense product operates in the field it can harm someone or something it was never meant to — and the standard policy is written precisely to avoid paying when it does. A strike drone with a guidance fault, a kinetic interceptor whose debris falls to the ground, an RF countermeasure dropping a drone onto bystanders, a defective aircraft part, or a breathing rig failing at depth all produce catastrophic third-party bodily-injury and property-damage claims. Off-the-shelf CGL and product forms carry blanket weapons, munitions, aircraft, war and "expected-or-intended-injury" exclusions, so a single serious loss can exceed the company's entire valuation with no cover behind it. RiskCube sources specialty munitions / defense Product Liability with weapons and war-risk carve-backs — and pursues SAFETY Act and government-contractor indemnification — so a collateral-damage claim is transferred rather than retained.