Resilience Conference 2025 - about the event and about us
We are excited to announce the second Resilience Conference, which will be in London on September 29-30, 2025.
Resilience Conference was founded because we believe that our adversaries are at war with us, and therefore we are at war. The breakdown of the post-war era in which NATO maintained relative peace in Europe leaves us facing a new age in which autocrats, oligarchies, and dictators will be attacking democracies from all angles. To ensure our children can grow up with the same freedom and stability we have enjoyed, we believe we now need to prepare quickly to defend our way of life.
It is clear that this defence will not involve the same partnerships that have provided mutual security since 1945, and will not be sustained only with conventional military technology developed and built within peacetime structures. Ukraine has shown that startups, innovation, and technology will be key to this fight.
Europe in particular needs to work out quickly how it will defend itself. Our fragmented defence manufacturing base and marketplace is not fit for purpose. Increasingly it is falling to the private sector, including VC investors and startups, to step up and meet this challenge in a way that is faster and more radical.
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.
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.
The conference encompasses the democratic alliances of the EU, NATO, and AUKUS, and their partner countries, most importantly Ukraine.
Our 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.
Resilience Conference will look at 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.
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 photos or names 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.
About Resilience Conference
In 2024, we launched Resilience Conference to bring together the tech sector with the defence and national security community. It is clear from the Russian invasion of Ukraine that startups and the tech sector have a crucial role to play in the defence of our democracies. The military and national security communities across NATO and partner countries need to understand and work more closely with the tech sector, and startups and VCs need to be more willing to get involved in defending the democracies in which they have thrived.
Our first conference in 2024 saw leaders from the military and intelligence community share a stage with the VCs and founders who are changing the defence sector. We curated important conversations and valuable networking in a totally unique event. This remains the reason we are running Resilience Conference.
Resilience Conference is a mission-driven independent business. We fund the conference through sponsorship and ticket sales to maintain this independence. In 2024 we gave away a third of our tickets to people from the public sector who needed to be in the room. We also do not charge Ukrainians to attend. This business model enables us to convene people and curate content that is impactful, challenging, and constructive and not restrained by political or commercial agendas.
As an independent media company, we separate our commercial and editorial activity. Our sponsors support our work, and we value their advice and support in building the conference. However, nobody pays to be on our stage, and there is no connection between sponsorship and speaking opportunities. Everyone on the stage is there through merit alone. This ensures truly engaging content.
What you will find at the 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.
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, and startups. We celebrate the best, not just the most senior; we focus on emerging leaders as well as current leaders.
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.
Tech Media meets Defence
Resilience Conference is run by former TechCrunch executives and editors who bring decades of experience curating and producing the world’s leading tech conferences. We focus on having journalists moderate panels to keep them fast and challenging. We know how to find the most impactful startups. We keep panels small, avoid keynotes, and embrace fireside chats to keep our content authentic, impactful, and engaging.
Resilience Media and Conference are mission-driven. We want to see greater collaboration across this ecosystem so we invite other journalists to moderate panels and cover the event. We partner with other defence tech conferences and hackathons, and work closely with organisations from across this ecosystem to make sure we’re all supporting each other’s work. This is about an existential threat, not just about business, and that collaborative approach has emerged as a unique feature of this latest iteration of the tech sector.
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 most insightful content, you have to be in the room to hear it.
A limited number of Early Bird Tickets are available, which you can register for here. If you want to sponsor the conference, please reach out to our team.