Welcome 🇪🇺

Welcome to the 3rd issue of the European Resilience Newsletter and thank you to those who already subscribed! Uwe and I (more about us at the end) started this newsletter to accelerate the building of the European DefenceTech ecosystem and fill a critical gap in European Resilience. We will keep the content bite-sized, frequent and free. We also openly invite guest content creators to contribute (see below for details on how to join). Our goal is to build an ecosystem of founders, operators, investors, and industry experts who are dedicated to enhancing European resilience through technology.

Huge shout out to Eric @ 201.vc for hosting the first European DefenceTech Summit in Madrid last month. Amazing speaker line-up for a small but fast growing community of European sovereign minded founders and tech investors. If you didn’t get a chance to speak with us during the conference please do reach out - we would love to catch-up.

German Armed Forces Cyber Innovation Hub InnoDay on November 29th

The Cyber Innovation Hub of the German Armed Forces will hold its annual InnoDay on November 29, 2023. Hosted this year by the Bundeswehr’s Logistics School, the goal of the event is to bring together all of the creative and innovative potential within the Forces, and to foster an exchange with likeminded people in science and business. This year’s focus topic will be AI and the various dimensions of disruption enabled by the technology. There will be keynotes, lectures, interactive workshops, and product presentations, as well as plenty of opportunity for networking. Our very own Uwe Horstmann will contribute a keynote on the current defense innovation landscape. The Cyber Innovation Hub was established in 2017 by the German Federal Department of Defense as its innovation lab and has since completed hundreds of tangible projects in partnership with soldiers, internal startups, and external suppliers.

Registration for the InnoDay 2023 is open at www.cyberinnovationhub.de/innoday-2023

German Drone Dual-Use Startup Raises $67 Million Series B 🛩️

Last month during the 1st European DefenceTech Conference in Madrid, one of the speakers posed a timely question to the audience: “How many of you actually invests in Series B in European DefenceTech?”. In the audience of just over 100 people which was a mix of investors, founders and operators - only one single lonely person put their hand up - to which the speaker continued to make her point that perhaps European VCs are not ready to support these dual-use DefenceTech companies, despite having Europe’s first war on the continent since WW2.

Florian Seibel (CEO of Quantum Systems) and myself were in the audience quietly listening. Despite the candid question and answer, both of us are extremely hopeful that things are about to changing in Europe. As you may know, last week Quantum Systems closed a Series B investment round of $67m co-led by our friends at HV Capital and DTCP, two major German growth funds that have made their first investments in European Dual-Use DefenceTech. This round is the first time an European dual-use tech start-up raised over €100m in capital and as such we - both founders and investors a like - truly believe in establishing European dual-use DefenceTech as its own major category.

Why is dual-use so important? During the same conference, Alex Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation for Ukraine outlined the incredible uptake of multiple new generation drone platforms and that Ukraine were consuming / replacing upwards of 1,000 drones per week during the war. More importantly, the same drone platform are used for commercial large area surveying in simulating tailing damn failures in Ghana to Pelican nest counting in Louisiana, demonstrating the robustness of the technology for many use cases as well as a diversification of revenue streams for dual-use tech businesses like Quantum Systems and their investors.

Uwe and myself at Project A Ventures are super excited to have backed Florian and the Quantum Systems team for their Series A round and also doubled down in this Series B round. We are of course always looking out for founders building dual-use tech platforms and start-ups in Europe at any stage so please do reach out to us!

You can find the official PR announcement on Quantum Systems on here on Bloomberg. 

News That Caught Our Attention 👀

• Shield AI raised $200m with a valuation of $2.7b to scale military autonomous flying tech - TechCrunch link

• Lambda Automata raises €6m led by our friends at Air Street Capital to bring affordable real-time, analyst grade, field intelligence - Bloomberg link.

• Our friends at Inflection.xyz posted a great summary of the European DefenceTech Summit in Madrid last week - Substack link.

• Insights into the economics of missiles and counter-missiles in the current Israel and Hamas war - DefenceOne link.

Featured Jobs 👷

Every week we feature a list interesting roles in European DefenceTech start-ups and scale-ups for readers seeking their next challenge in their careers.

• Lambda Automata: Machine Learning Lead (London, United Kingdom)

• Lambda Automata: Robot Fleet Cyber Security Lead (Athens, Greece)

• Comand.ai: Tech Lead (Paris, France)

• Comand.ai: Senior AI engineer (Paris, France)

• Helsing: Program Manager (London, United Kingdom)

• Quantum Systems: Regional Sales Manager, Africa / Middle East (Remote Work)

• Quantum Systems: Software Developer AI/ML Computer Vision Sensors (Gilching, Germany)

• ARX Landsystems: Founders Associate (Munich / Hybrid, Germany)

If you are a founder and would like to promote your open roles, please get in touch with us!

Passionate and want to contribute? 👩🏻‍💻

The European Resilience Tech Newsletter is always looking for regular and guest authors, writers, reporters, content creators etc. If you like what you read, you are passionate about improving European resilience regardless of your background and want to contribute, just reach out to us!

European Resilience Tech Newsletter Team

Uwe Horstmann co-founded Project A Ventures in 2012 as General Partner and has built Project A to be a leading European early stage investor with over $1bn USD under management and having backed 100+ founders. In addition to Project A, Uwe serves as Reserve Officer in the German armed forces and advises the German Ministry of Defence in digital transformation issues.

Jack Wang is a software engineer turned product driven tech investor and joined Project A in 2021 to lead the firm’s deep tech investing, which have grown to include DefenceTech. Prior to joining Project A, Jack worked in a variety of organisations such as Amazon and Macquarie Group across Australia, US and UK / Europe. Jack holds a MBA from London Business School and Bachelors of Engineering (Bioinformatics, 1st) from UNSW, Australia.

Project A Ventures is one of the leading early-stage tech investors in Europe with offices in Berlin and London. In addition to 1 billion USD assets under management, Project A supports its 100+ portfolio companies with a platform team over 140 functional experts in key areas such as software and product development, business intelligence, brand, design, marketing, sales and recruiting. Project A have backed founders of Trade Republic, WorldRemit, Sennder, KRY, Spryker, Catawiki, Unmind and Voi as well as founders building in European Resilience: