Dispatches from Finland - Defence Tech Meetup 2025
Investors make a case for dual-use remaining in the frame, and startups give tips from their playbook for growing business
“If you go the SDR [Sovereign Defense and Resilience] way, and if you are building the solution for the civil market and for the military market at the same time, interesting things are going to happen,” Sandra Golbreich from BSV Ventures told the audience at Defence Tech Meetup 2025 in Finland this week.
BSV Ventures, Millog, DEFINE and FinBAN hosted an intimate forum in Helsinki this week for defence and dual-use founders, investors, integrators and ecosystem partners, and Resilience Media had a front seat to all the action.
Golbreich delivered a talk on the state of defence, sovereign and resilience investing in Europe. The deep tech and dual-use investor said it is not the role of venture funds to invest in weapons. Their role is to get returns, and that could be from a wider range of resilience innovations.
“No war can be run without the infrastructure. When we are talking about resilience, we’re talking about energy resilience, food resilience, resources and water,” she said.
Looking at where the next wave of unicorns could come from, she said we should be looking at sovereign defence clouds, AI-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance orchestration and swarm autonomy.
If European startups can overcome the challenges of the region’s procurement system, (which include the budgeting cycles and the long sales process which can take anything from two to five years), then that will become their strength and they will be able to secure other markets outside Europe, she said..
Procurement – specifically selling to the likes of NATO and countries’ ministries of defence – was a strong theme at the event overall. On hand to share experiences were Henry Harm from multi-domain digital communication platform Wayren, Ukrainian members of the trauma counselling platform Aspichi, and acoustic sensor network startup Zvook.
The takeaways from those discussions ranged from obvious to insightful. Products need to be easy to onboard, reliable and in stock, the startups said. Companies should lean on the media to create buzz about what they are building. And selling in your home country first helps build customer confidence for you to go further afield.
More ambitiously, they recommended bypassing ministries of defence – and the months or years it may take for a decision there – to sell directly to select end users in cases where it’s possible to do so. This also helps companies iterate on their products faster, they said.
Working in markets like Ukraine, there are opportunities to use local funding programmes to sell to local buyers and work on “proof-of-concept” deployments. And a focus on “the whole solution”: integrations and partnerships with other startups and primes should all definitely be on the table.
Founders also pitched new products at the event.
Finnish startup Grey Raven Technologies showed off some work in development: munitions for non-lethal training and simulation purposes.
SelectAM, also from Finland, provided consulting and software to help companies adopt on-demand digital manufacturing quickly and efficiently in their supply chains.
AILiveSim lastly showed off its AI platform for providing intelligent simulation and automated data pipelines, generating targeted training scenarios.
BSV team are doing a great job! And Wayren are a class act. Visited them in Tallin and recorded a podcast with them to come out soon - very impressed!