Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media.
As the World Economic Forum comes to a close and European NATO leadership breathes a small sigh of relief that Greenland won’t be invaded, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to founders and investors about how buffeted the defence and security startup ecosystem is by geopolitical events. Hugo Jammes, EDT Ventures explores the far reaching impact this has on the industry in his most recent column for Resilience Media. Hugo’s column will now appear every month, as part of an extended guest post series we’re launching, with more columnists to be announced over the coming weeks. His latest is is excerpted below.
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Ukraine’s Brave1 and Palantir announced this week the launch of a ‘Dataroom’ which will use war data to test and train AI models to develop battlefield applications. While not a public-facing application, if a user has the right security clearance this Dataroom will be an invaluable tool as companies develop drone-interceptor technologies. We examine the partnership in an excerpt below by Managing Editor, Ingrid Lunden.
It was a big week for funding announcements with early stage companies Twentyfour Industries, Dominion Dynamics, and Equal1 raising a collective $87M; while DTCP launched a €500 million fund dedicated to defence, security, and resilience technologies becoming what it says is Europe’s largest privately backed investment initiative focused squarely on the sector.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- Power outages and small checks: The perils of being a VC in Kyiv
- Auterion conducts live fire swarm drone strike test
- AI in cybersecurity remains a tool for understanding, not response
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-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media
How geopolitics complicates venture
Hugo Jammes, Columnist
For the last three decades, European venture capital has benefited from a grand assumption that rarely makes it into pitch decks or LP updates: geopolitical stability. The rules-based international order – open markets, predictable regulation, enforceable contracts, and global supply chains – acted as the invisible scaffolding beneath every investment thesis. The scaffolding has now all but collapsed and the consequences for European startups and investors are profound.
2026 has ushered in a new era. Geopolitics now threatens to seriously complicate investment strategies and commercial choices. In the first few weeks of 2026 we have seen flashpoints in Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland, alongside broader global tensions (not to mention the tragic ongoing conflict in Ukraine). These events will have far reaching consequences for valuations, exits, supply chains, and even cap tables. Geopolitics has moved from the margins of venture to its centre. The question is no longer whether this shift matters, but whether Europe’s innovation ecosystem is prepared for it.
The end of predictability
For the venture community, Western governments have long offered a structural “trust premium” that authoritarian regimes cannot replicate without undermining their own power. But what happens when a democracy starts acting in ways that are less predictable and how does this complicate the decisions for startups and investors?
VC is fundamentally an exercise in long-term risk management. Trying to assess what the world will look like five to 10 years from the point of investment is made marginally easier if the regulatory and political environment is predictable and transparent, where the law protects minority investors and reputational risks are low. For a VC today, geopolitics is not a tick box but a central calculation of ‘Tail Risk’. That calculation becomes exponentially harder when the geopolitical environment is unstable.
Sanctions, export controls, tariffs, industrial and foreign policy now change faster than most markets can price. Dual-use and deep-tech companies, once under- served, are now exposed to the full force of geopolitical competition. The result is a new class of risk that European VCs must model but cannot diversify away.
Palantir and Ukraine’s Brave1 have built a new AI “Dataroom”
Palantir, the US data analytics giant, has been a regular presence in Ukraine helping with its defence against Russia since the war kicked into gear in 2022. It’s provided AI insights to help with de-mining projects, predicting where to target fire, and giving the country’s forces overall battlefield intelligence. The latest chapter of that relationship is being unveiled today. Brave1, the country’s effort to bring more defence tech to Ukraine’s forces, is launching a new project with Palantir called the Brave1 Dataroom, which will use war data to test and train AI models to develop battlefield applications.
Palantir said that the first Dataroom efforts will focus on improving autonomous tech to detect and intercept drones. Initial libraries will include already “curated collections” of visual and thermal datasets of aerial targets, primarily Shahed drones, it noted. The list will expand over time.
In addition to Brave1, Ukraine is bringing in its Ministry of Defence, its Armed Forces and its Defence Intelligence Research Institute to both contribute data and use the insights that are coming out of the Dataroom project.
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