Greg Williams, deputy global editorial director at Wired, moderated a fireside chat with Kusti Salm, CEO of Frankenberg Technologies, and Ophelia Brown, founding and managing partner at Blossom Capital. The discussion focused on how private capital, wartime lessons, and manufacturing scale are reshaping Europe’s defense landscape.
“Governments and ministries of defense have certainly realized that they need to start procuring innovative technologies and new products that they’re not already buying,” said Brown. “So there’s a creation of new budget, there’s awareness, there’s a conversation happening between startups and governments and MODs in terms of how procurement would work and how they would access such budgets.”
“Obviously, the challenging part is that a lot of contracts and a lot of spend is obviously tied up with existing defense primes, they’re long-dated, they’re large contracts, they’re already able to supply governments with products they need and especially in times of warfare like we have at the moment, you know, you need to fulfill instantly or over in the very near term.”
“So there’s a gap for startups, especially those are those are starting now that don’t necessarily have commercial readiness, but need the contracts for proof of funding and how to accelerate,” she said.
Salm argued that private money is changing development dynamics.
“For the first time in 70 years, we are in the situation where there is private money available for developing defense technologies and weapons,” he said. “This situation never occurred.”
He noted that founders can now help define requirements, pointing to Frankenberg’s focus on low and slow drones as the immediate problem set.
On lessons from Ukraine, Brown highlighted two shifts. First, governments acknowledge the need to stockpile in peacetime and are raising defense budgets as a share of GDP. Second, there is growing demand for lower cost missiles that can be produced at scale, rather than small batches of very expensive munitions.
Both investors urged startups to be bold when it comes to proposing new technologies. After all, working with the incumbents is often cost prohibitive.
“I think Lockheed would be happy to send sell millions of stinger missiles to Ukraine or other countries, but UK would become bankrupt in the first two weeks in that contract,” said Salm.
Europe’s market fragmentation and slow certification still pose barriers. Salm’s view was direct. Requirements in Europe mirror Ukraine’s from day one, so air defense and long range fires should remain the focus.
“You forget a lot of these requirements if people start to shoot at you,” he said, arguing for faster, more pragmatic adoption.
Speed, affordability, and scale were recurring themes.
“The average missile program throughout the last 50 years has been 8.5 years. We are delivering our first product in less than a year. We do it with ten times less of a price tag,” said Salm.
He described fast tracked factories in Estonia and Latvia and a scale ambition far beyond today’s short range missile output, while noting even 100 times current capacity would still meet only a small fraction of Ukraine’s daily needs.
From the investor side, Brown said defense startups must clear the same bar on outcome potential as software companies. Public comparables may trade well on cash flow, but not on revenue multiples, so market size and revenue visibility matter. She emphasized founding team composition, citing the value of deep domain expertise, hardware experience, and the ability to recruit scarce talent.
In summary, Brown and Salm were completely focused on resilience and the future of defence in Europe.
“We’re very fortunate to have investors who see the importance of private capital going into resilience as a topic,” said Brown. “So I think from the outset we know that we’re aligned with our investors in terms of where the dollars are going in terms of resilience.”
“The sector is late to scale in Europe, but private capital, lessons from Ukraine, and a focus on affordability can accelerate progress if procurement and certification frameworks adapt.
