A startupmafia deep dive into the investors bankrolling Europe’s sovereignty push
Three years ago, “defence tech” was a category most European VCs quietly avoided — LP agreements often excluded weapons-adjacent investments outright, and founders building dual-use hardware struggled to get a meeting, let alone a term sheet. That world is gone. War in Ukraine, collapsing confidence in the US security guarantee, and a wave of national rearmament programs (Germany’s €152 billion, France’s €76 billion, the EU’s €800 billion “ReArm Europe” push) have turned defence and dual-use technology into one of the fastest-growing corners of European venture.
The numbers tell the story. European defence, security, and resilience startups raised a record $8.7 billion in 2025, up 55% year-on-year and roughly four times the volume of five years earlier — with the sector now accounting for over 40% of all European deeptech funding. Germany alone attracted 42% of invested capital in 2025, with the UK and France close behind; together the three markets account for well over half of all European defencetech deals. Growth is increasingly concentrated in large, late-stage rounds, which nearly tripled year-on-year as companies like Helsing, Tekever, Quantum Systems, Iceye, and Destinus closed mega-rounds north of €150 million.
But there’s a catch European founders know well: a large share of that late-stage capital — and by some estimates the vast majority of NATO-aligned defencetech VC funding since 2019 — has come from outside Europe, mostly the US. That imbalance is exactly what’s driving a new generation of homegrown funds, from NATO’s own venture arm to Franco-German growth vehicles, all racing to build “sovereign” capital that keeps European IP, talent, and control on the continent.
Below are 15 of the European VCs actively shaping this market — from NATO’s institutional fund-of-funds down to solo-GP outfits run by former intelligence officers.
1. NATO Innovation Fund (NIF)
HQ: Amsterdam, Netherlands | Founded: 2023 | Fund size: €1 billion
The NATO Innovation Fund is the most structurally significant vehicle on this list simply because of who’s behind it: a €1 billion multi-decade fund backed by 24 NATO Allied nations, making it arguably the world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund. NIF invests both directly into deep-tech startups and indirectly by anchoring other specialist funds (several names further down this list — Alpine Space Ventures, Join Capital, and Expeditions among them — count NIF as an LP).
Its mandate spans defence, security, and resilience broadly defined: novel materials and manufacturing, AI and robotics, space, quantum sensing, and critical infrastructure protection. Direct portfolio bets include German robotics manufacturer ARX Robotics and quantum-sensing company Aquark. NIF’s stated horizon for portfolio companies runs up to 15 years — a patience most traditional European VCs can’t match, and one explicitly designed to fund the kind of hardware-heavy, long-procurement-cycle companies that defence requires.
2. Expeditions
HQ: Warsaw, Poland (with a London presence) | Founded: 2021 | Latest fund: €197 million (Fund II, closed 2026)
Expeditions is unusual even by defencetech standards: it was founded by academics who studied autonomous weapons systems, including general partner Mikolaj Firlej, whose Oxford doctorate focused on regulating autonomous weapons and who has advised UK, Polish, and UN bodies on the subject. That policy fluency has become a genuine edge in a sector where regulatory and export-control literacy often matters as much as technical diligence.
Fund II closed well above its original €150 million target, boosted by a €25 million anchor commitment from BAE Systems as part of the UK prime’s wider €50 million push into European venture funds. Expeditions plans to back up to 40 early-stage companies across autonomy, AI, cybersecurity, quantum, communications, and space, with typical cheques in the €250k–€2.5 million range. Portfolio companies include Croatian FPV-drone maker Orqa, Estonian counter-drone specialist Frankenburg Technologies, France’s Comand AI, and Ukraine’s UForce.
3. Join Capital
HQ: Berlin, Germany (offices in London and Milan) | Founded: 2017 | Latest fund: Fund III, targeting €235 million
Join Capital backs early-stage deep tech across enterprise, industrial, space, and defence, with a thesis built around technologies that create an “asymmetric” strategic advantage for Europe. Its second-generation fund already manages over €150 million, with LPs including the NATO Innovation Fund, Isomer Capital, Germany’s KfW Capital, and Italy’s Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.
What sets Join Capital apart in 2026 is regulatory validation: the European Investment Fund committed €50 million to Join Capital’s Fund III through the InvestEU Defence Equity Facility — the EIF’s largest defence commitment to date, explicitly designed to strengthen the financing ecosystem around specialist European defence VCs. Fund III is targeting around 25 early-stage investments in dual-use, security, and space technologies.
4. Earlybird & AVP — E2D Fund
HQ: Berlin, Germany & Paris, France | Launched: June 2026 | Target size: €500 million
E2D is the biggest and most closely watched new entrant of 2026: a Franco-German growth-stage fund built jointly by Berlin’s Earlybird (a veteran European deeptech investor managing €2.5 billion with nine IPOs and 41 trade sales on its track record) and AVP, the growth platform formerly known as AXA Venture Partners, which manages more than €2.5 billion across venture and growth strategies.
E2D is squarely aimed at the gap that keeps pushing Europe’s best late-stage defence companies toward American capital: growth-stage funding at scale. The fund plans roughly €25 million average tickets into about 20 companies spanning space, air, land, maritime, and subsurface domains, prioritising semiconductors, AI, New Space, autonomous effectors (drones and robotics), and directed energy. An advisory board of NATO, military, and industry figures sits alongside the investment team, and its first close was slated for June 30, 2026.
5. Project A
HQ: Berlin, Germany | Founded: 2012 | Latest fund: €325 million (Fund V, closed June 2025)
Project A is one of Europe’s most established early-stage generalist VCs — €1.2 billion in AUM, 130+ portfolio companies including Trade Republic and Sennder — but it’s notable here for how deliberately it has pivoted toward defence since 2022. Fund V, its largest to date, explicitly targets defence, fintech, AI, and supply-chain software, with 15–20 investments planned per year and initial cheques of €1–8 million.
Project A’s operating-partner model (in-house product, marketing, and data teams supporting portfolio companies) is now being extended into dual-use hardware, an area historically underserved by generalist VC. Its clearest proof point is Quantum Systems, the German reconnaissance-drone maker that became a defencetech unicorn.
6. OTB Ventures
HQ: Amsterdam, Netherlands (with a Warsaw office) | Founded: 2017 | AUM: ~€300–350 million
OTB Ventures bills itself as the largest deep-tech VC to originate from Central and Eastern Europe, and defence is one of four core pillars alongside SpaceTech, Enterprise AI/Automation, and Cybersecurity. Co-founder Marcin Hejka’s career — from post-communist Poland to VP at Intel Capital — informs a thesis built explicitly around European technological sovereignty and dual-use potential.
OTB typically writes €1–7 million initial cheques and can commit up to €25 million per company across multiple rounds, targeting post-product, revenue-generating companies (late seed through Series B) rather than pure pre-revenue bets. Portfolio companies span space cargo (ATMOS Space Cargo) and enterprise automation, reflecting the fund’s preference for dual-use technology with clear commercial pull alongside defence relevance.
7. Vsquared Ventures
HQ: Munich, Germany | Founded: 2020
Vsquared Ventures is a Munich-based deep-tech investor spanning New Space, new computing, energy transition, robotics and manufacturing, and tech-bio — a portfolio construction that puts it at the centre of Munich’s emergence as one of Europe’s leading defencetech hubs, alongside industrial neighbours like Quantum Systems and Helsing. The firm has made over 60 investments to date, including Estonian autonomous-UAV company Lendurai’s 2025 seed round.
Vsquared’s roots in deep, physics-heavy technology — rather than software-first investing — mean its defence exposure tends to run through dual-use hardware: sensing, robotics, and advanced manufacturing platforms that serve both commercial and military end markets.
8. Kembara
HQ: Barcelona, Spain | Founded fund status: €750 million first close (2026) toward a €1 billion target
Kembara is the largest DeepTech fund raised in Europe so far in 2026, targeting growth-stage companies at Series B and C. Its remit explicitly includes dual-use and defencetech alongside AI, robotics, compute infrastructure, clean energy, SpaceTech, and advanced materials — reflecting how mainstream “generalist deeptech” funds are now writing defence into their core thesis rather than treating it as a side bet.
For founders, Kembara represents a rare growth-stage European option outside the dedicated defence funds — useful for dual-use companies that don’t want a defence-only cap table as they scale toward later rounds.
9. b2venture
HQ: Berlin, Germany | Founded: early 2000s (as b2venture) | Latest fund: €150 million (Fund V, closed January 2026)
b2venture describes itself as industry-agnostic, focused on scalable, “defensible” early-stage European technology — a portfolio that has historically included DeepL, SumUp, and 1KOMMA5°. Fund V’s early investments already include Nautica Technologies and Hive Robotics, signalling a deliberate expansion into hardware and robotics plays with dual-use applications.
b2venture is a useful example of a mainstream, non-specialist European fund now actively courting defence-adjacent deal flow rather than screening it out — a shift happening across the continent’s early-stage ecosystem, not just among dedicated defencetech shops.
10. 201 Ventures
HQ: Europe-focused (managed by a solo GP) | Fund size: $22 million
201 Ventures is a compact, high-signal fund worth knowing: a $22 million first fund managed solo by Eric Slesinger, a former CIA officer, with an explicit mission to advance freedom and autonomy in Europe. It typically writes pre-seed and seed cheques into defence, security, and resilience companies.
It’s a useful illustration of a broader pattern in the space: a growing number of former intelligence and military operators are becoming solo GPs or angel-style investors specifically because they can evaluate classified-adjacent, dual-use technical claims that generalist VCs can’t diligence on their own.
11. Alpine Space Ventures
HQ: DACH region (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) | Focus: early-stage space technology
Alpine Space Ventures is an early-stage fund built around more than 50 years of combined industry space experience among its team, backed as an LP fund by the NATO Innovation Fund. It runs a concentrated portfolio strategy — fewer, more deeply supported bets — aimed at startups delivering space-enabled capabilities relevant to both commercial and defence customers.
Its portfolio includes Uplift360, an advanced-materials company focused on recovering and reusing high-value composite waste from aerospace, defence, and industrial sectors — a good example of the less headline-grabbing, supply-chain-resilience side of European defencetech investing.
12. Lakestar
HQ: Zurich/Berlin, with a pan-European presence | Notable 2026 development: €50 million co-commitment from BAE Systems
Lakestar is a well-established generalist European VC with a long track record across consumer and enterprise tech; its inclusion here reflects a very current signal — BAE Systems’ 2026 decision to place strategic capital commitments into both Expeditions and Lakestar specifically to “deliver next-generation capability for allies across the continent.” That a UK defence prime is anchoring capital into a historically generalist fund underlines how far defencetech has moved from the margins of European VC into its mainstream.
13. Seedcamp
HQ: London, UK | Founded: 2007
Seedcamp is one of Europe’s original and most prolific early-stage investors, and it now appears consistently in defence-investor mapping alongside dedicated funds like OTB Ventures, Join Capital, and the NATO Innovation Fund. Its relevance here is less about a single defence-only thesis and more about pattern: as a firm with deep pan-European sourcing networks and a 15+ year track record of backing technical founders pre-product, Seedcamp is increasingly a first check for dual-use founders who later graduate to specialist defencetech growth funds.
14. Roosh Ventures
HQ: Kyiv, Ukraine (offices in Paris and London) | Founded: 2021
Roosh Ventures is an entrepreneur-led, co-investment-focused fund investing from pre-seed to Series A, historically built around enterprise SaaS, fintech, gaming, and AI. What makes it relevant to this list is location and timing: as principal Adam Hashchyshyn has noted, Ukraine’s defence-tech sector is booming even as other domestic sectors stagnate under wartime conditions, and Roosh sits at the centre of that shift — backing Ukrainian founders and diaspora teams building dual-use technology forged, quite literally, on the front line.
Roosh has made around 20-30 investments to date, including participation in growth rounds like Seattle-based data infrastructure startup Gable, and continues to co-invest alongside international funds entering the Ukrainian and CEE ecosystem.
15. Vesna Capital
HQ: Central & Eastern Europe / Ukraine-focused | Focus: dual-use and defencetech in and around active conflict zones
Vesna Capital is one of a cluster of CEE-focused funds — alongside 1991 Ventures and Balnord — that have built specific expertise in investing “next to war zones,” a niche that has gone from reputational liability to competitive advantage almost overnight. At the CEE VC Summit 2026, partners from Vesna Capital, alongside OTB Ventures, Roosh Ventures, 1991 Ventures, and Balnord, discussed how geopolitical risk in the region is increasingly viewed as a source of battlefield-tested product validation rather than pure downside.
Funds in this cluster typically write smaller, earlier cheques than the mega-funds above, but they carry outsized influence because they are often the first institutional money into companies that later attract NATO Innovation Fund, Join Capital, or E2D-style growth capital.
The bigger picture
A few patterns cut across this list worth flagging for founders and LPs alike:
- Institutional legitimacy has arrived. The European Investment Fund’s €50 million InvestEU commitment to Join Capital, and BAE Systems’ direct commitments to Expeditions and Lakestar, show defence primes and EU institutions now actively seeding VC funds rather than just buying finished products.
- The growth-stage gap is the current battleground. Nearly every dollar figure above skews toward addressing one problem: Europe can fund seed and Series A defencetech reasonably well, but late-stage growth capital has disproportionately come from the US. E2D, Kembara, and Project A’s Fund V are all explicit attempts to close that gap.
- Geography still matters enormously. Germany, the UK, and France dominate both capital and deal count, but Munich, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Kyiv are all emerging as genuine hubs in their own right — not just satellite offices of London and Berlin funds.
- Founder profile is shifting. Expect to see more funds led by former intelligence officers, military-adjacent academics, and operators with security clearances — 201 Ventures and Expeditions are early examples of a trend likely to accelerate.
If you’re building in this space, the honest takeaway is that European capital is finally catching up to European ambition — but the check sizes, sector fluency, and speed of diligence still vary enormously fund to fund. Do your homework on ticket size and stage focus before you pitch; a mismatch here wastes months that defence founders, more than most, don’t have to spare.
Sources: FCF DefenseTech Venture Capital Report 2026, Dealroom & NATO Innovation Fund (2025/2026), Vestbee, Bloomberg, Tech.eu, PitchBook, EU-Startups, and public statements from the funds named above. Fund sizes and figures reflect publicly reported data as of July 2026 and may change as funds continue to raise.
