Tally

Tally is a free, public directory of the UK defence sector. The name is the air-combat call for “I have visual”, the moment the thing you were looking for comes into view.

It pulls public information about defence companies into one structured, searchable place: what each company does, its capabilities, size and location, the frameworks and accreditations it holds, its website and LinkedIn, and a dated line or two of recent news. Companies only, public facts only. No people, no opinions, no rankings.

Why we built it

Finding the right defence company is harder than it should be. The information is public, but it is scattered across hundreds of gov.uk pages, trade-body directories, supplier registers and press releases. A founder in our 2025 research put it best: ‘there wasn’t a single map of the world’. The primes are easy to find; the micro and small businesses doing the interesting work are not. Tally puts them in one place, and makes a point of surfacing the smaller companies rather than only the big names.

It is also a working example of what we do for clients: turning scattered public information into structured, AI-ready market intelligence that supports business development and outreach.

If you would rather have the directory as Markdown files, or pull it into your AI knowledge base, the whole thing is on GitHub at github.com/milux-ltd/tally.

Search the directory

Filter by capability, company size, location, framework and accreditation. Search returns the companies that match everything you asked for first, then the near misses underneath, so a search for a small additive-manufacturing company near Hampshire with Cyber Essentials Plus still shows you who is close.

Open, and yours to use

Tally is open. The whole directory lives in a public repository you can browse, clone, or pull into Obsidian and search offline. Get it at github.com/milux-ltd/tally.

It sits alongside Foothold. Foothold is the operating system a defence founder runs on; Tally is the map of the companies around them.