Keen raises €150M fund, Erica Dill-Russell and Mike Pompeo join Kraken, and Helsing and Stark open UK factories
Issue 49: Plus Keen raises €150M fund, Erica Dill-Russell and Mike Pompeo join Kraken, and more
Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media
Greetings from Helsinki where the startup conference name lived up to the weather outside. It is rather unsettling being in a country that shares a 900km border with Russia. As I was en route from the airport into town I was reminded of a conversation I had at Resilience Conference with Teemu Seppala, Technology and Innovation Director, Defence Innovation Network Finland (DEFINE) / City Of Riihimäki. Teemu spoke on a panel called The Future Battlefield: Defending NATO’s Eastern Flank which was about preparedness in the face of imminent threat from a civilian, technology, and military perspective.
Finland excels in preparedness and societal resilience, and for good reason. Russian aggression is a feature of Finnish living memory and Teemu shared the above photo with me to illustrate how their society has not forgotten. The picture, taken in 1985, documents debris from a Soviet missile in Lake Inari, Lapland. The Soviets later apologised, saying the rocket launch was a mistake — but if we look at recent events in the UK, Romania, Poland, the Russian pattern of testing NATO defences is consistent and multi-domain.
Startups across the breadth and depth of the defence tech ecosystem are making a statement about their part in the defence of our democracies. Just this week alone:
In the UK, Helsing opened a maritime manufacturing facility and Stark opened its first drone factory.
Kraken Technology Group expanded its team and board, with the addition of Chief Commercial Officer Erica Dill-Russell and appointing rumoured Republican presidential contender Mike Pompeo to its board AND announced a $49M deal with USSOCCOM
Chaos Industries raised $510 million to build counter-drone radar networks while Sunflower Labs raised $16M to scale autonomous security drones
PhysicsX reached near-unicorn status following $20M investment from Nvidia. Ingrid Lunden, who has been reporting on the company since its early days, covered the announcement which you can read more in our Startup Watch section below.
We also looked at the German commitment to innovation — or lack thereof — in a guest post by Said D Werner and Prof Dr Helmut Schönenberger, excerpted below in our Guest Post section.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
CISA tells critical infrastructure to ‘be air aware’ as drone threats surge
SkySafe launches Forensics as a Service, a way to trace drone accidents
VIDEO: Proper Voltage makes batteries better for nearly anything, especially the battlefield
The ‘Waze’ of the open waters: Orca AI’s co-captain brings real-time data sharing to commercial shipping
Given the volume of defence tech news these days, I can’t see things slowing down much in December. Got a tip, funding announcement, or news? Send it our way. And with that, I’ll see you again next week.
-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media
“Now is a critical moment to align around ambitious defence, security, and resilience start-ups and investors focused on filling capability gaps and accelerating the capacity of innovation ecosystems across the Alliance.” So said Prof. Dame Fiona Murray, newly elected Chair of the Board of the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF).
The Zeitenwende at Three: Turning capital into capability
Three years after Europe’s political watershed – the Zeitenwende – sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany finds itself caught between departure and stagnation in answering this call to action.
Special funds have been approved, defence spending is rising, procurement reforms have begun. Yet one Achilles’ heel remains: the lack of intelligent steering of capital flows between demand and supply – the very core function that seems to be led by an “invisible hand” in places like Greater Boston, Silicon Valley and Israel.
In truth, this dynamic owes little to Adam Smith’s notion of political economy. Read more here.
PhysicsX — the London-based startup building an AI-based software platform to run better simulations for those designing, building and testing advanced hardware — is getting a little more firepower to expand its business.
Today the startup confirmed that NVentures, the VC arm of Nvidia, has made a strategic investment of $20 million into its latest round, bring the total funding for the Series B to $155 million.
The startup’s valuation appears to be staying largely flat with Nvidia’s infusion: it is currently at just under $1 billion, which was the same as it was in June 2025 when it initially announced the round at $135 million, led by Atomico with participation from Temasek, Siemens, Applied Materials, July Fund, General Catalyst, NGP, Radius Capital, Standard Investments, and Allen & Co.
For those who have been watching PhysicsX, this news might not come as a huge surprise. Read the full piece here.
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On the front line of Europe’s standoff with Russia’s shadow fleet
Russian spy ship pointed lasers at RAF pilots tracking it, says UK
Verteidigungsministerium vergibt KI-Auftrag an Airbus und Helsing