About Unstrat
An independent defence and security vendor, founded in 2022 and led by people with experience in business-building, military service and defence production.
Mandate
Unstrat is an independent, non-aligned prime vendor of defence and security capability. We represent specialist manufacturers and take responsibility for coordinating the programme between manufacturer and buyer. Our role is to understand the requirement, bring the appropriate manufacturer teams into the response, and keep procurement, delivery and support connected. Independence gives us room to select capability across manufacturers. It does not exempt an engagement from export controls, end-use rules or the regulations of the equipment's country of origin.
The experience behind Unstrat
Building a business, operating equipment and taking a system into production demand different kinds of judgement. We bring those perspectives into the same customer programme. Alongside Mahesh's business-building experience, Lt Col H F Rangwala (Retd) brings a military background; Ravi Menon contributes experience in product support and international defence business; and R K Potluri brings more than 35 years in missile production and industrial management.
Leadership
Entrepreneur and investor with over four decades building companies across the US, Europe, the Middle East and India. He is the founder of Pinstorm, one of the world's earliest digital-first marketing firms; co-founder of Seedfund, one of India's earliest institutional venture funds, which backed some of the country's best-known startups at their first stage; and co-founder of one of the first private companies to put satellites into orbit. At Unstrat he sets strategy, selects the manufacturers the company represents and leads relationships with governments and enterprise customers across the Gulf, Africa and Asia. He is a widely read commentator on business and technology, and is based in Dubai.
A retired Indian Army officer who leads business development and client engagement across Unstrat's markets. He owns the customer relationship from the first controlled briefing through demonstration, evaluation, contracting and programme delivery, and is the named point of contact buyers return to at every stage. His military background shapes how Unstrat engages: requirements are understood in operational terms before any capability is proposed, claims are kept conservative, and the questions a procurement board will ask are answered before they are raised. He works closely with manufacturer teams to align technical responses, training and sustainment plans with what the end user actually needs.
Retired in 2025 from the senior leadership of a leading defence manufacturer with over $400 million in revenues, after a career spanning marketing, international business, product support, business development and corporate services. He brings deep, practical knowledge of how government defence production actually works: programme approvals, export clearances, offsets, product support and the long relationships between production units and their armed-forces customers. At Unstrat he advises on engagements with state-owned and large private manufacturers, and on structuring programmes so that delivery, training and sustainment survive first contact with real procurement timelines.
Served in the senior leadership of a leading defence manufacturer with over $400 million in revenues, after more than 35 years in missile production and industrial management. His career covered the full arc of taking complex defence systems from design hand-over to serial production: production engineering, quality, vendor development and the industrial discipline that keeps delivery schedules honest. At Unstrat he advises on manufacturing scale-up, transfer-of-technology and local-production programmes, helping buyers judge what genuine industrialisation of a capability requires and helping manufacturers structure co-production commitments they can actually keep.
Company-building experience, before Unstrat
Mahesh Murthy's work spans marketing, investment and technology. He has spent two decades building companies rather than only marketing them.
- 2018First launchExseed Space, now Satellize
Mahesh co-founded Exseed Space, now Satellize. His role spans strategy, national programmes and capital; co-founder Ashhar Farhan leads spacecraft engineering and mission operations. It is experience of building a space business alongside the people responsible for making the hardware work.
ExseedSAT-1, a privately built amateur-radio communications satellite, launched aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 in December 2018. In April 2019, AISAT followed on ISRO's PSLV-C45 mission as a payload on the rocket's PS4 orbital platform. These are milestones in Exseed Space/Satellize's flight history, not Unstrat deployments.
That business brings together mission requirements, spacecraft, launch arrangements, ground links and the people who operate the system. The company's current programme offering also includes mission control and operator training. A satellite in orbit is a milestone; useful capability on the ground requires the rest of the programme to work.
For Unstrat, the relevance is practical. Mahesh's space-company work adds experience of coordinating technical teams, capital and customer requirements in a demanding engineering business. It supports the procurement approach we use here: define the requirement, coordinate the technical response, and plan for training and support after delivery. Commercial leadership and engineering are different responsibilities. A credible programme needs both.
Read Mahesh's career history - 2004Pinstorm
Mahesh founded Pinstorm in 2004. Its early model paid for clients' media and linked its own payment to their growth. Commercial responsibility was part of the business model, not a promise added to the pitch.
Read Mahesh's career history - 2006Seedfund
Mahesh co-founded Seedfund in 2006. The venture fund backed redBus and CarWale, giving him experience of working with businesses through their early development and growth.
Read Mahesh's career history
What we take responsibility for
Introducing a manufacturer is not enough. We stay involved through the procurement programme, with a named customer relationship and manufacturer teams working against the same requirement.
Understand the requirement
The operating environment, end user and procurement constraints come first. Lt Col H F Rangwala (Retd) leads the customer engagement, so the requirement is understood in operational terms before a capability is proposed.
Confirm the export position
Classification, end use and the export-control chain are checked before representation. Independence does not remove the rules that govern the equipment's country of origin.
Coordinate the technical response
We work with manufacturer teams on demonstrations, evaluation and contracting. Training and sustainment plans must address what the end user needs, not merely what appears in a catalogue.
Plan beyond delivery
Operator training, knowledge transfer and sustainment belong in the programme. Where local production is required, our advisers bring experience in production engineering, quality and vendor development to the discussion.
Legal identity & governance
Unstrat is the trading name of Intanj Marketing Management FZCO, a company incorporated in the United Arab Emirates. It operates under general trade licences, and every engagement is conducted in full compliance with the regulations of the country of origin of the equipment or materials supplied.
- Legal entity
- Intanj Marketing Management FZCO
- Registration number
- 17700
- Headquarters
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates
- Founded
- 2022
Locations
Gulf and wider MENA operations, client liaison and in-region support.
European operations, manufacturer coordination and programme governance.
India operations, manufacturer liaison and production-programme support.
Operating principles
No national prime stands behind us
We represent independent manufacturers rather than one country's prime. A requirement can therefore be met by whichever maker is genuinely good at that part, not by whichever product a foreign ministry has cleared for release this year.
Classification before representation
Classification and end-use govern everything. Nothing is represented to a market until the export-control and end-user-certificate chain is confirmed.
One name on the programme
Unstrat is the single, named point of accountability between manufacturer and buyer, through procurement, delivery and sustainment. When something slips, there is one party answerable for it rather than a chain of hand-offs.
Capability you can run without us
Training and knowledge transfer are written into the programme, not offered afterwards, so the customer operates and sustains the capability long after handover.