Intelligence-Driven Innovation: OSINT as a Strategic Enabler in Defense & Dual-Use Tech
Author: (Ret. Army Officer) Kile Sears - Semantic Visions
Kile Sears is Strategic Partner at Semantic Visions and contributes to Luminova Ventures’ defense innovation research.
_____________________________________________________
The defense landscape in 2025 is being reshaped by two converging forces: geopolitical urgency and technological acceleration.
As competition between great powers intensifies, governments are turning to dual-use technologies-tools that can serve both civilian and military applications-as the backbone of future security and economic resilience.
According to Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge, NATO nations now host roughly 17,600 dual-use scaleups - about 27% of all tech scaleups worldwide-with cumulative investment surpassing $1 trillion by mid-2025.This explosion in defense-oriented deep tech signals a major shift: the next generation of autonomy, AI, sensing, and cyber capabilities will often emerge from commercial startups, not traditional primes. This explosion in defense. For NATO, the strategic question is no longer whether to engage the commercial sector-but how to do so intelligently, securely, and at speed.
OSINT: From Situational Awareness to Strategic Foresight
In this environment, open-source intelligence (OSINT) has evolved from a supplementary information stream into the primary layer of defense foresight.
The traditional intelligence model-centralized, classified, and slow-moving-is being overtaken by the sheer velocity of open data.
Ernst & Young (EY) describes OSINT as “the intelligence discipline of first resort,” able to identify risk, opportunity, and disruption long before other channels.
By combining machine learning with multilingual analytics, OSINT surfaces weak signals: a patent filing in Shenzhen that hints at a military breakthrough; a supplier registration in Prague that quietly shifts ownership to a Chinese holding; a change in Russian export documentation that foreshadows embargo circumvention.
These micro-indicators, when aggregated, allow defense and industry leaders to see around corners.
Semantic Visions' Partners, Carahsoft, has an OSINT Subcommittee Report, calls OSINT “a cornerstone of modern national security,” underscoring how publicly available data complements classified intelligence by filling blind spots, especially in supply chain risk, disinformation, and cross-border technology transfer.
Why Defense Investors and Builders Use OSINT
In both government and venture investment, decisions are being reshaped by intelligence discipline. The best-funded dual-use technology means little if it fails under compliance, reputation, or export control stress. That’s where intelligence-driven due diligence comes in.
1. Diligence with depth.
OSINT goes far beyond financial vetting. It verifies founders, funding sources, and beneficial ownership while scanning global media for reputational risk or undisclosed government ties. Semantic Visions, for example, can detect a supplier’s hidden connection to an adversarial entity or a prior export-control violation-insights not visible through standard financial channels, potentially seen in the images below.
“By expanding our export mapping by customs records where goods were transshipped through a Kazakhstan, we were able to detect company names identical to those to which Czech companies exported their goods and which eventually delivered those goods to Russia.”
Image #1: Snapshot of Semantic Visions showing unusual transshipping activity through nodal mapping.
Image #2: Snapshot of Semantic Visions Intelligence Capabilities & Customs Data.
2. Continuous early warning.
Traditional audits are static; OSINT monitoring is continuous. Automated systems track shifts in law, geopolitics, and sentiment. A subtle new export restriction, a rumor of instability near a rare-earth mining site, or an uptick in cyber chatter targeting a defense contractor can all be flagged within hours.
A fundamental information gap would be provicinal articles from China that rarely hit English and are even more unlikely to be collected from it’s original source. Semantic Visions is able to penetrate this hidden layer, in addition, grab from forums that speak in the Chinese language from outside China’s influence.
Below is an article originating from a Social Media forum in Germany, written in Chinese. To extrapolate where this user received their information from, based on the language, formatting, and structure, it was almost certainly pulled from a Caixin-style or mainland provincial economics source (likely reposted via a WeChat “热点观察” or “证券市场” channel). It reads like semi-official Chinese commentary, possibly adapted from Caixin, 21世纪经济报道, or 财经网content circulated through WeChat aggregator feeds – a secondary post. This would be a fringe early warning indicator that would be aggregated with official news and cross-referenced with analytical rigor to find a base line “true” in an economic-style intelligence summary.
Image #3: Snapshot of SV’s Open-Source Collection on open Social Media Sources in Chinese.
Investors can begin to piece together nuggets of information from the ever-growing volume of data, scoped and targeted by Semantic Visions, to then inform executives on risks prior to investment.
3. Portfolio stress-testing.
For venture capital and procurement alike, OSINT can model systemic exposure. By mapping supplier and customer relationships, analysts can simulate how a Taiwan Strait crisis or a new sanctions regime might impact semiconductor or battery-dependent firms. The U.S. Government Accountability Office warns that the DoD still lacks visibility into over 200,000 suppliers-most of them below Tier 2. Semantic Visions’ OSINT can fill that gap.
Below is a basic custom dashboard for an APAC organization who wanted to focus on risks and opportunities following specific commodities related to Drones and Semiconductors.
Image #4: Snapshot of SV’s Open-Source Collection on Drones and Semiconductors (Commodities)
4. Compliance and adoptability.
Dual-use ventures must remain on the right side of ethics, law, and optics. OSINT helps track regulatory shifts and public debates-from AI weaponization to data privacy-that influence adoption by defense ministries and investors.
Semantic Visions: Turning the World’s Data Into Decision Advantage
Semantic Visions (SV) represents the modern intelligence model in action. Its AI-powered OSINT platform scans 1.9 million sources daily across 12 languages, transforming unstructured text into structured, decision-grade insight. SV has partnered with Carahsoft and a data consortium used by the U.S. Intelligence Community to deliver services to U.S. and allied clients, SV supports missions from defense supply-chain illumination to disinformation early warning and market-trend prediction.
This capability is particularly valuable to ministries of defense and industry leaders that need to anticipate-not just react to-systemic risk. For example, SV’s event-detection algorithms can correlate changes in shipment patterns, minor factory disruptions, or foreign acquisitions to alert stakeholders of possible chokepoints or strategic dependencies. In practice, this gives defense planners and investors the same early advantage that battlefield commanders gain from real-time situational awareness.
In the below illustration, SV has published a brochure demonstrating our capabilities of a U.S. company being acquisitioned by a Chinese Company, SV was able to capture the event, but we had already seen this event incoming prior to the acquisition. Analysts can use our data to conduct narrative analytics to begin conducting predictive analysis before Chinese companies can capture suppliers.
Image #5: Chinese Acquisition of a US supplier of sub-base chemical for stealth aviation coatings.
Unseen Threats: How OSINT Protects the Defense Industrial Base
2025: A Transatlantic Reconfiguration
Across Europe and North America, the lessons of Ukraine, pandemic supply-chain disruptions, and industrial espionage are catalyzing new intelligence-driven approaches to defense modernization.
- Investment and coordination surge.
The European Defence Fund (EDF) allocates roughly €7.9 billion (2021–27) to collaborative R&D, while the NATO Innovation Fund adds €1 billion for deep-tech ventures.
Without strategic visibility, these resources risk duplication. OSINT ensures that investments align and complement across allies rather than compete. - Supply-chain illumination as doctrine.
Visibility below Tier 2 is now a defense imperative. OSINT supply-graphing exposes not only economic dependencies but also political leverage points, such as PRC or Russian ownership within EU industrial ecosystems. This intelligence is shaping new policies on friend-shoring, critical raw materials, and industrial resilience.
"Semantic Visions can illuminate this and wrap our highly contextualized data around needs for national defense and global industrial systems. See the illustration below."
Image #6: Filtered to Chinese Company, to OEMs; OEMs supported largely by Chinese suppliers.
Image #7: Basic analytical finding, showing LiDAR component dependency.
Recent export-control cases involving major primes show that even top-tier defense suppliers can miss hidden upstream vulnerabilities.
Image #8,9 - Export Control & Compliance Issues
These examples illustrate systemic dependencies identified through open-source data, not specific allegations of misconduct.
From Data to Decision: What Defense Leaders Should Do
- Map to Tier 4. Treat critical sectors-semiconductors, batteries, rare earths, sensors, silicone, lithium and firmware-as red-flag zones. Use OSINT to uncover ownership, control, and geographic exposure.
- Institutionalize early warnings. Establish continuous OSINT feeds that track export rules, sanctions, hostile takeovers, and disinformation waves.
- Scenario planning, not hindsight. Run OSINT-informed simulations for supply shocks or policy shifts and prepare contingency sourcing plans before crisis hits.
- Maintain ethical advantage. Monitor legislation, human rights discourse, and AI/autonomy norms to ensure dual-use innovations remain trusted and deployable.
Conclusion: Intelligence as the New Industrial Base
In the 20th century, power was measured by industrial output. In the 21st, it will be measured by information advantage-the ability to see faster, decide smarter, and act earlier than adversaries.
Open-source intelligence is at the core of this transformation. It bridges the worlds of policy, capital, and capability, enabling defense ministries, investors, and innovators to operate with clarity amid volatility. As Semantic Visions’ ethos captures succinctly: “See everything, focus on what matters.”
By leveraging OSINT for supply-chain integrity, technology foresight, and strategic resilience, allied governments and industries are building not just smarter defenses, but a more secure and innovative transatlantic ecosystem.
In a decade defined by uncertainty, intelligence is not just a function-it is the foundation of agility, credibility, and power.
__________
Illustrative examples based on aggregated open-source data; not an endorsement or specific client record.
Discover how Semantic Visions supports the defense sector — explore our full range of insights and solutions↗.
