Welcome back from summer. We have been working hard to pull together the agenda for Resilience Conference London on 5-6 October, and we’re excited to share it with you today.
The conference is deeply mission-driven. The aim is to connect NATO military and national security communities with the tech sector to ensure our democracies are best placed to defend themselves now and in the future.
Resilience Conference London 2026 is characterised by some core themes:
- We look at the future. What is next, with defence, investment, and startups.
- London is our international conference. We welcome speakers from Ukraine, Nigeria, the US, Canada, and across Europe as well as the people leading defence and national security in the UK.
- This is a unique gathering. We bring together military and national security leaders with investors and startups to build the networks that are essential for the future.
- As well as panels, we will be convening breakout sessions, expert briefings, and workshops in the background.
- We share around a third of our tickets strategically across the military and national security communities to ensure maximum impact from the event. There will be a concentration of end-users at the event, keen to learn about startups and build relationships.
- We invite the media to ensure the event creates impact beyond the room. The event produces content across the international media.
This year we have curated the most impactful, influential, and informative roster of speakers to take to a stage to speak about Defence Tech in Europe to date. The content will be tightly moderated by some of the leading journalists and experts in the field, and is designed to be impactful and essential for anyone interested in the future of defence and technology.
To enable meaningful conversations, quite a lot of the content is off the record. You have to be in the room.
We are very pleased to welcome back to our stage General Sir Roly Walker, Chief of General Staff of the British Army, who spoke at our first conference in 2024. The British military and national security community will be well represented on the stage, with two senior National Security speakers, the new CEO of HMGCC, the UK’s national security engineering agency, Paloma McGuinness, the new CEO of NSSIF, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund, and General Sir Rob McGowan, the new Commander of Cyber & Specialist Operations Command (CSOC).
From NATO we welcome Sally Pfenning, Director of Requirements and Resource Integration Directorate, USEUCOM; Nikolaos Loutas, Director Innovation, NATO HQ; James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Strategy and Policy, Cyber and Digital Transformation, NATO; and John Ridge, Chief Adoption Officer and Ari Jonsson, President, both of the NATO Innovation Fund.
Matching the calibre of leaders from the public sector, from the tech sector we welcome Taavet Hinrikus, one of Europe’s most influential tech entrepreneurs, and partner at Plural; Peter Sarlin, CEO of NestAI, a European pioneer in AI, and Europe’s leading defence tech investors, including Eveline Buchatskiy, Managing Partner, D3; Mikolaj Firlej, Managing Partner, Expeditions; Chris Magazzeni, Investment Director, Lakestar; and Erik Balck Sørensen, CIO, EIFO.
As the war in Ukraine escalates and the US battles Iran, air defence is a critical topic. We are pleased to bring founders from across the Eastern Flank and Front Line of NATO to talk about their technologies and what it will take to defend NATO from aggression. You’ll hear from Kusti Salm, CEO, Frankenberg Technologies; Vitalii Kolesnichenko, CEO, Airlogix; Agris Kipurs, CEO, Origin Robotics; and Janne Hietala, CEO, Kelluu, and others.
The defence tech leaders on the stage include Antoine Bordes, CSO, Helsing; Sven Kruck, Co-CEO, Quantum Systems; Marc Weitfeld, Founder and CEO, ARX Robotics; and Srđan Kovačević, CEO, Orqa.
We have our largest media presence so far, with senior writers the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, Handelsblatt, New York Times, Sky News, MIT Technology Review, The Wall Street Journal, and of course Resilience Media. This creates a unique opportunity to meet the media, arrange interviews, and share news. For the first time, Sky News will conduct interviews in its own studio from the Resilience Conference floor, and we will be recording interviews with speakers and attendees in our own podcast studio (yes, we’re launching a podcast soon!).
In the background, the event will also feature breakout sessions, our newly-introduced expert briefings, and a variety of public sector organisations and investors will be running their own workshops and side events within the conference, bringing even more key people into the room.
We also continue to build our partnerships, underlining the importance we attach to collaboration. This year we introduce panels that are curated in partnership with organisations who bring their expertise to the event, including the Milken Institute, The Resilience Imperative, and Athena.
All of this makes it the most unique gathering and networking opportunity for defence tech in Europe. This is about building networks to support defence. To support this, we have no VIP areas and we arrange extensive opportunities and space for people to meet and talk during the event.
We are grateful to our sponsors for supporting the event. This makes it possible for us to share a third of our tickets for free with the public sector, and to continue our policy of not charging Ukrainians to attend. As an independent media company, we keep a strict separation between our editorial and commercial activity: nobody pays to speak at our conference, and there is no sponsored editorial content on our main stage.
We will be announcing more speakers in the coming weeks, and for security reasons we will not announce some of our speakers except to the room, on the day.
Tickets are selling fast and will sell out soon. You can buy yours here.
We look forward to seeing you in October.
