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ARTICLE · 10 MARCH 2026

Under The Hood: How Defence Startups Really Protect IP

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Ask a room full of defence company founders how they think about intellectual property and you will most likely hear...

CanadaIntellectual Property
Tony Sabeta
Tony Sabeta
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Two Defence CEOs, One IP Question

Ask a room full of defence company founders how they think about intellectual property and you will most likely hear:

Patents are everything.

Patents are useless.

Trade secrets are safer.

NDAs don't mean anything.

The answer, as it turns out, depends a lot on what the company is actually building and how exposed it becomes once development transitions into real‑world use.

That distinction came through clearly in two recent conversations I had with CEOs working on very different problems in the same broad ecosystem. Both are serious technologists. Both are operating in defence. And both have landed on very different IP strategies, intentionally.

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