Beaten Zone Venture Partners Backs Seitec in turning a passive, all-weather sensing modality into a new class of defence capability – detecting the threats conventional sensors cannot and reshaping the military and security landscape.
INVESTMENT ANNOUNCEMENT
DATE: 20 August 2026
Beaten Zone Venture Partners backs Seitec in turning a passive, all-weather sensing modality into a new class of defence capability – detecting the threats conventional sensors cannot and reshaping the military and security landscape.
Beaten Zone Venture Partners (BZV) announced Fund 1’s participation in the Seed round for Seitec Pty Ltd, a Canberra-based dual-use defence technology company developing software-defined seismic sensing systems for military operators. The round comes as Seitec converts early sovereign-government reference deployments and allied trial pipelines across two products and three geographies.
Founded by Daniel Stevens, a former RAAF officer with 20 years of service and direct end-user experience of the problem the company solves, and Bevan Fairleigh, an intelligence technologist with an edge-AI and security-cleared background, Seitec combines deep operational insight with technical depth to address two of the most acute gaps in modern defence sensing, the detection of unexploded ordnance on live-fire ranges and the detection of low-observable aerial threats that active sensors are structurally blind to.
Seitec’s platform runs two software packages on a single hardware architecture. UXOTrackS detects, localises, and classifies ordnance impacts across weapons ranges in near real time, resolving a decades-old range-safety problem that no commercially available system had solved. Nightingale provides passive seismic detection and classification for perimeter security, force protection, and counter-UAS, autonomously classifying personnel, vehicles, and drones, and detecting the RF-silent and fibre-optic-controlled drones that radar and RF stacks cannot intercept. Both run on identical nodes at the lowest tactical tier, require minimal connectivity, and pass outputs directly to the soldier through ATAK.
The Seed round includes Beaten Zone Ventures, Activate Capital, and UNSW, enabling Seitec to scale delivery capacity and stand up US market entry to convert its current trial pipeline into contracted revenue. Seitec has reached ADF service entry for UXOTrackS, holds paid trial contracts with the Air Warfare System Program Office and the Australian Office of National Intelligence, has advanced through the USAF Foreign Comparative Testing programme, and is running an active integration trial with DroneShield.
“Seitec represents the shift from active, emitting sensors to passive, all-weather detection that works where nothing else can,” said Steve Baxter, Founder and Lead Investor at Beaten Zone Ventures. “They are building a single seismic platform that compounds across multiple defence budgets, where every deployment makes the next one smarter. This is exactly the kind of sovereign capability that strengthens national security, survivability, and lethality for allied forces.”
Key Highlights of Seitec
- UXOTrackS: A distributed seismic node array that detects, localises, and classifies unexploded ordnance impacts across live-fire ranges in near real time, a capability with no direct commercial competitor.
- Nightingale: A passive seismic detection system for perimeter security and counter-UAS that identifies the RF-silent and fibre-optic drones active sensors miss, with autonomous edge-AI classification and ATAK-native outputs.
- Traction: ADF service entry achieved on less than A$1M of external capital, with paid trials across AWSPO and ONI, USAF Foreign Comparative Testing advancement, and an active DroneShield integration.
- Market Opportunity: Structural growth across allied defence budgets, range modernisation, and a counter-UAS market projected to exceed US$19B by 2035, driven by escalating drone threats and increased spending by NATO and AUKUS partners.
Inside the Investment
Passive sensing is returning to the modern defence stack as a mainstream capability, yet most solutions remain focused on active radar, RF, and electro-optical modalities that share the same structural blind spots. The threats that matter most, unexploded ordnance and low-observable drones, are precisely the ones these systems cannot see.
BZV invested in Seitec because it turns ground vibration into a reliable signal source in denied and degraded environments, closing detection gaps the active sensing stack is structurally unable to address.
Our rationale is grounded in three strategic drivers:
Category Ownership in Uncontested White Space
In live-fire range instrumentation, Seitec defines a capability with no direct commercial competitor. The contest is access and conversion rather than displacement, and the first vendor written into a range programme of record is costly to unseat. Diligence with allied range operators of decades’ experience confirmed none had encountered a comparable real-time seismic UXO detection capability before Seitec.
One Platform, Compounding Advantage
Rather than scaling by funding separate hardware programmes per market, Seitec amortises a single hardware platform across two products and multiple procurement budgets, addressing three markets at a capital intensity a single-market incumbent cannot match. Every deployment adds labelled seismic signature data on a single hardened platform, a separable asset that widens the moat with each fielded array.
Sovereign Capability and the Shift to Passive Sensing
Military advantage is shifting toward layered architectures where passive seismic is a defined capability node rather than an optional add-on. Australian-owned IP and a domestic manufacturing footprint open the AUKUS and Five Eyes channels foreign vendors cannot reach, positioning Seitec as a first mover through the pathways that will set the reference cases for allied procurement.
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ABOUT BEATEN ZONE VENTURE PARTNERS
Beaten Zone Venture Partners is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, and invests in sovereign early-stage businesses with products that have material military use and contribute to Australia’s national security and the survivability of allied warfighters. The scope precludes investments involved with controversial weapons, such as landmines, or other capabilities that would violate Australian ratified treaties or agreements.
MEDIA CONTACT
Stephen Baxter Lead Investor and Founding Partner (steve@beatenzone.vc)
Peta Ellis General Manager (peta@beatenzone.vc)
ABOUT STEVE BAXTER (www.stevebaxter.com.au)
Steve is a passionate Australian, Queenslander and ADF veteran. He has been investing into the Australian technology scene since 2011 with over 90 companies funded. He was the founder of South Australian dial up ISP SE Net, and co-founder of Brisbane based whole telecommunication company PIPE Networks. Following successful exits, Steve started River City Labs, Startup Catalyst, River Pitch and TEN13 as well spending one year as Queensland Chief Entrepreneur and four seasons on the Channel Ten show ‘Shark Tank Australia’.