Celebrating Slipstream Design’s £1.5m commercial success

Celebrating Slipstream Design’s £1.5m commercial success from the Janus Allies accelerator programme

Janus impact stories

17 August 2026

NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) was founded with one deliberate aim: To help connect and empower the Alliance’s top dual-use startups to scale innovative solutions that address NATO’s critical defence challenges.

Slipstream Design is a standout example of that mission in action. Selected for the NATO DIANA 2026 cohort from over 3,200 applications – and one of just 28 UK startups across the NATO Alliance selected – Slipstream Design joined our London-based cohort earlier this year. In just six months, the company secured £1.5 million in defence contracts.

Who is Slipstream Design?

Founded in 2011, Slipstream Design specialises in digital and radio frequency technology.

Building on more than a decade of experience across aerospace, security and communications, it delivers expertise in adaptable digital radio frequency design solutions.

Slipstream’s core product is ASTRO – a wideband adaptive radio processor that accelerates digital beamforming. It provides faster, more adaptable, and more reliable communication performance. By processing signals directly at the edge, ASTRO provides dual-use capabilities across demanding multi-domain environments:

Defence, Aerospace and Security: High-performance systems for land platforms, maritime radar, signals intelligence and electronic warfare.
Space and Telecommunications: Resilient RF architectures powering satellite constellation networks, ground station beamforming and next-generation telecom networks.
Quantum Computing: Solving complex RF, microwave and mmWave challenges for applications such as quantum computing.

Supporting Slipstream’s growth

As the chosen delivery partner for UK Defence Innovation (UKDI), Janus, the UK Accelerator for NATO DIANA, provided Slipstream with direct access to end users and real-world testing environments, allowing the team to receive operational feedback on ASTRO in the field. What would have otherwise taken years of feedback and validation was condensed into the programme’s six months, giving them accelerated improvements and growth far beyond the regular timeline of an SME.

“For the last six months, we’ve gone at a pace that I didn’t think was physically or mentally possible,” added Sarah Gregory, Commercial Director. “There are so many exciting opportunities on the horizon for Slipstream.”

“Through the accelerator programme, we’ve had the opportunity to talk to end users, while really honing in on our key capabilities and the things that provide the most value to the users,” explained Wei Sam, Senior Design Engineer in Electronic Engineering at Slipstream.

Sarah said that the Janus Allies accelerator has “given us the contacts, and that means that we can still work with the primes, but we can work with them to bring in that extra dimension, that extra layer of feedback that will really make our products successful”.

Through Janus, the Slipstream team were also able to access expert advice and mentoring networks, giving them a clearer understanding of possible defence procurement channels and how to navigate them effectively and efficiently. This proved important to Slipstream’s success, directly enabling them to translate end-user engagement into major commercial wins, landing them with two separate contracts totalling £1.5 million in high-value defence contracts during their time in the cohort.

“It’s been an absolute privilege to have Slipstream on this journey with us,” says Marcus Roberts, Director of Operations at IoT Tribe and Janus Allies. “Getting to know Sarah and the wider team, along with the rest of the innovators, over the last six months has been a real pleasure. To watch Slipstream grow and land contracts of this scale in such a short space of time has been incredible to be part of and is exactly what Janus is here to do for the Allies.”

Slipstream’s experience with the Janus accelerator through the NATO DIANA programme represents a powerful catalyst for growth, both in product development and building credible, meaningful defence industry relationships.