Announcing Resilience Conference 2025
Issue 13: We are excited to announce the second Resilience Conference, which will be in London on September 29-30, 2025
Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media
We are excited to announce the second Resilience Conference, which will be in London on September 29-30, 2025.
Resilience Conference will bring together senior members of our military, national security agencies, and governments with leading investors, founders, and journalists over two days to discuss with urgency the role of technology in defence and national security.
The on-stage content will examine how the military and national security community can work with the tech sector, how we can increase the volume and type of funding available to the sector, and the role startups and tech innovators will play in the defence of our democracies.
The conference encompasses the democratic alliances of the EU, NATO, and AUKUS, and their partner countries, most importantly Ukraine. Read the full post about Resilience Conference and our values here.
Our first round of speakers
Our first speakers set the tone for the conference we are building. We are thrilled to announce Kerry Baldwin, Managing Partner at IQ Capital; Philip Lockwood, VP of Strategy and MD of Stark International; Ragnar Sass, Co-founder of Darkstar; and Raj Shah, Managing Partner at Shield Capital.
Kerry Baldwin is a highly experienced British investor who has been in this space longer than most people. She also advises the UK government on how to bring more finance into defence, in particular from the pension sector. Her perspective will be critical as we continue to explore how better to fund the defence of our democracies.
Having just left NATO, Canadian Philip Lockwood will join us in his new role as VP of Strategy and Managing Director of STARK International, providing a comprehensive look at a defence tech startup working in the EU.
Estonian unicorn founder Ragnar Sass has led the tech sector’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since the earliest days of the war as co-founder of Darkstar. Darkstar brings together investors and startups with Ukrainian frontline units to deploy tech quickly into the battlefield. We wrote about Darkstar’s work here.
Raj Shah is an American pioneer in defence innovation, bridging between the military and tech sector as a former fighter pilot and Managing Partner of the DIUx, and leading the sector as a founder and investor. We profiled Raj in an early issue of the Resilience Media newsletter.
What to expect at Resilience Conference 2025
Based on the success of our 2024 conference, the 2025 event will expand to two full days, featuring a broader range of content and speakers, and more networking opportunities. We will work closely with the many partners we have across this complex ecosystem to curate an event that addresses an agenda that is now — more than ever — fundamental to the survival of our democracies.
Through 2025, we will be curating events and media content focussed on some key topics to lead into the conference. Alongside a wider agenda, these topics will include space, undersea, manufacturing, disinformation, and funding beyond venture capital.
We also want your feedback on what to cover. You can suggest a speaker or topic here.
Who should attend Resilience Conference
Resilience Conference is for operators. We seek out the people being radical, creating change, and moving the needle. We use our stage and breakout sessions to share best practice from across this mix of sectors and geographies.
Expect to see leaders from militaries and intelligence agencies, leading and emerging VCs, amazing startup and scale-up founders, people everyone has heard of, and the new heroes nobody has heard of. Some speakers will have photos and names you’ll recognise, other speakers won’t have names or identities at all. We create a unique and highly secure environment in which people who don’t usually mix anywhere can mix with the tech sector.
As well as the conversations on the stage and in breakout sessions, the conference is all about networking. We want to create better network connectivity across the ecosystem to support it working more effectively. We curate both the speakers and attendees to create impact from this gathering. Our 2024 conference was unique in having attendees split roughly a third each military and government, venture capital investors, and startups. We celebrate the best, not just the most senior; we focus on emerging leaders as well as current leaders.
You have to be in the room
Our conference is unique in inviting members of the intelligence community and military leaders to speak off the record on our stage. This is fundamental to our mission of bringing their world closer to the tech sector. In order to protect the identities of intelligence professionals, and to allow military leaders to speak freely, none of this content is recorded or reproduced. We have very strict rules prohibiting photography at the event, and with these speakers that applies to us too so we switch off all our video and audio recording before they take to the stage. For some of our best content, you have to be in the room to hear it.
A limited number of early bird tickets are for sale here. If you want to sponsor, please get in touch with our team.