A new London startup, founded by a team with roots in defence and AI, is emerging from stealth this morning, armed with one of the biggest defence tech seed rounds of the year in Europe. Agon is aiming to build AI infrastructure specifically to train defence models in Europe, and to get going, it is coming out of the gates with $30 million.
Lakestar, Lux Capital, Northzone, and XYZ are among the startup’s initial investors, the company said, and the funding is coming in the form of a $7 million pre-seed followed by a $23 million seed. The list of top-shelf investors involved here underscores the attention and push that defence tech is attracting in the current geopolitical climate.
The gap that Agon is setting out to address is to provide more and better training data for artificial intelligence systems designed to work in defence.
Artificial intelligence is at the heart of how modern defence systems are being built. It’s used in operations software, powering command and control platforms to manage how troops and their equipment are deployed and what they do. And it’s used in physical devices: autonomous and uncrewed drones, missiles, tanks, sea vessels and other hardware all lean on AI for navigation, decision making, predictive intelligence — all to outsmart adversaries’ systems (which also run on AI).
The challenge with AI, however, is that it is very hungry for training data to ‘learn’ how to work better, and there is generally a scarcity of that data.
This is one reason why so many defence tech companies swarm into Ukraine. They can potentially kill three birds with one stone: help a sovereign country fight a war against a larger invader-aggressor; sell some of their products to that military to do the job; and, last but not least, improve their AI products in the process, with live battlefield training data.
But that supply gap is not just a problem for defence tech companies.
As with other AI applications in healthcare, government or financial services, nations want to build sovereign defence systems, independent of reliance on other countries and secure in how they are run. They may want to use their own confidential data to build it. All of that will require new kinds of secure training environments to customise how defence products will work for specific end users.
“We are in an AI arms race,” said CEO Tristam Constant, in a statement. “Agon is developing the infrastructure that will ensure European defence can iterate and orchestrate systems at the pace of the threat.”
Alongside this, while companies like Scale AI built their business on training for any and all AI models, there appears to be a growing understanding of how AI models will, longer term, be considerably more focused, training based specifically on what they will be used for. Thus, gaming engines for gaming applications, and defence environments for defence applications.
“Our launch today reflects the critical need for Europe to establish its own sovereign defence AI capability and the significant investor confidence in what we are building,” said Junaid Hussain, Agon’s co-founder, in the announcement. “With this investment we will now scale and iterate our platform for European end users.”
In an Odyssey-filled summer, it’s a nice piece of timing that the term “Agon” comes from ancient Greek, the name of a minor diety who represented struggle and came to mean competition and competitive gatherings. It’s also one more nod to the close links between gaming, AI and defence tech.
While Agon the startup has yet to announce any customers, the founders have a super interesting pedigree that might have also swayed investors.
Tristam Constant, the CEO and co-founder, previously headed up the European defence business for Applied Intuition, and before that he was a senior director for Europe at Anduril. He also spent 13 years before that in the British Army.
His co-founder, Junaid Hussain, is a serial entrepreneur. He is also the co-founder of Cambridge Aerospace — the defence tech unicorn that sources recently told us is very close to closing a round of $300 million at a valuation of nearly $3.5 billion, and he also co-founded the AI gaming company Iconic. He’s also been an investor in his past.
Agon’s chair, meanwhile, is David Helgason — the founder and ex-CEO of Unity Technologies, the blockbuster game engine company. As you can see from his PitchBook profile, he’s been a prolific investor into a range of startups, although Agon looks like it might be his first chairmanship of a defence tech company (the rest are all in gaming).
We have heard from people in the industry that while Agon has been operating in stealth for most of this year, it’s quietly been on a hiring spree, attempting to poach talent from other defence tech companies in Germany. The company today said that it has offices in both London and Berlin and that its team has come together with track records also at AWS, Google, Helsing, and Palantir.
Again, there are no customers listed in the company’s announcement of its emergence from stealth, and not too much about how it works. Given its founders’ past and present connections to a range of other companies in the space, those might be strong candidates in that funnel.
We’ll update this as we learn more.
