Good afternoon from Resilience Media.

This week, Estonia’s flagship tech conference, Latitude59, kicked off the day after Lithuania experienced a drone incursion which closed its main airport. While the incursion does not appear malicious, along with the Latvian incursion last week and regular air raid alerts along the Estonian-Russian Border, this is evidence of the evolving nature of threats to European NATO. Balts are sanguine about this unsettling activity. A Lithuanian I spoke to thinks that the region needs to ready itself for more incursions, and to acknowledge that even “friendly fire,” as she called wayward Ukrainian drones, will cause damage, but that this is the reality of living close to a war.

Within this context, it was a big week for startup funding. In our Deals section below, we examine Anduril’s Series H round (which brings the neo-prime to an astonishing $61B valuation); Fractile’s $220M funding round; Euan Blairs’s Multiverse foray into societal resilience with its recent £70M raise; and the 13 early stage technology companies the UK Ministry of Defence procurement has fast-tracked.

Helsing, on the cusp of it’s own enormous funding raise, forms a space JV with OHB to build AI-based targeting systems, which our Managing Editor, Ingrid Lunden, explains here. Estonian-based SensusQ exited to Quantum Systems, as covered by our Baltic Reporter, Fiona Alston.

Resilience Media Contributor, Paul Sawers trawled through the 100 Startups To Watch in 2026 recently and discovered interesting trends in maritime startup technology. His piece is excerpted below in the Trends section.

Elsewhere on Resilience Media:

• German couple arrested on suspicion of spying for PRC
• SFC Energy AG contracted to supply field batteries to Ukraine
• The UK adds a low-cost anti-drone system to its Typhoon fighter jets

I’ll be back in your inboxes next week. Thanks for reading.

-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media

Anduril raises $5B at $61B valuation in biggest defence tech deal of the year

• Defence startup Anduril Industries has pulled in a $5 billion Series H round at a $61 billion valuation, marking the largest defence tech raise of the year as investors continue piling into companies promising to modernise Western military capability before the next geopolitical crisis arrives.
• The funding round was led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, and comes as Anduril aggressively expands production capacity for autonomous systems, software-defined defence infrastructure, counter-drone technology, and long-range strike systems.

Fractile raises $220 million to build powerful AI chips

• UK AI hardware startup Fractile has raised $220 million in funding to build so-called “AI inference chips,” specially designed chips that can run entire pre-trained models instead of running stored models off of computer drives.
• Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund led the round with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, 01A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC.
• The company says current large language model workloads are already reaching tens of millions of tokens for advanced reasoning and agentic tasks.
• At existing inference speeds of roughly 40 tokens per second, Fractile estimates that some outputs can take weeks or even a month to complete on current hardware. This means current solutions will soon be too slow to do real and complex work like simulations and coding processes.

Multiverse raises $70M to help future-proof workforces in areas like AI

• A UK company that has built a platform to help train people and organisations to future-proof them against technology evolutions has raised a large sum of money to future-proof its own business.
• Multiverse — which provides upskilling and apprenticeship programmes in artificial intelligence, data science and engineering — has raised $70 million in funding at a valuation of $2.1 billion.
• The startup plans to use to funding to expand into more markets, and to specifically double down on one area of tech in particular: AI.
• To both of those ends, Multiverse also disclosed that in January 2026, it completed the acquisition of Berlin-based AI training company StackFuel for an undisclosed sum.
• Schroders Capital is leading the round by way of its private equity division. Previous backers General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, Stepstone, and D1 are also participating.
• The round represents a $400 million bump on its previous valuation, which was several years ago.

UK awards 13 defence tech startups with £4M fast-track procurement deals

• The UK government is throwing its weight behind a list of defence tech startups and awarding a series of contracts to spur more R&D in the country.
• A total of 13 companies are getting contracts worth up to £4 million each to provide the Ministry of Defence with new products and services.
• The awards come as part of the Ministry of Defence’s “Commercial X” initiative to try to speed up procurement activities. The list of 13 companies includes some better-known tech startups alongside some that are relatively more under the radar.
• They are The RC Den Ltd  (London), Aquark Technologies Ltd (Hampshire), Aether Aerospace Ltd (Newport, Wales), SpaceAM Ltd (London), Avenue 3 Ltd (West Yorkshire), Nereus Medical Ltd (Devon), Kraken Technology Group (Hampshire), Flowcopter Ltd (Edinburgh), Helyx Secure Information Systems Limited (Buckinghamshire), EP90Group Ltd (Winfrith Newburgh, England), Ritson Reid Ltd (Berkshire), SimCentric Limited (Oxfordshire), and Spectra Group UK Ltd (London).

The sea change in defence tech

Paul Sawers, Contributor

Warships are expensive, slow to build, and difficult to replace. At the same time, navies are being pushed to patrol larger areas, protect undersea infrastructure, and respond to the growing use of drones and autonomous systems at sea — especially given current geopolitical events in the Middle East and beyond.

This is driving a wave of interest in maritime autonomy startups. Companies building autonomous boats, drones, underwater sensing systems and ocean surveillance platforms are all attracting fresh attention and money, from investors, defence contractors and governments alike — a trend that surfaces (heh) throughout Resilience Media’s 100 Startups to Watch in 2026.

In March, Saronic Technologies, a US startup building autonomous surface vessels for the Navy, raised a whopping $1.75 billion round of funding at a reported $9.25 billion valuation. This followed roughly a year after the company had acquired a Louisiana shipyard to build and prototype larger autonomous vessels, including its flagship Marauder system.

Continue reading.

Our Strategic Partner, European Defense Tech Hub is awash with hackathons this year. Will we see you there?

EDTH Eurosatory Paris

Paris, France | June 12–14, 2026
Held alongside Eurosatory, one of the world’s leading defence and security exhibitions, EDTH Eurosatory Paris brings together founders, engineers, operators, and investors for a flagship hackathon focused on the future of defence technology. Participants will collaborate on next-generation solutions across autonomy, AI, resilience, and battlefield innovation.

EDTH Poland

Warsaw, Poland | June 19–21, 2026 EDTH Poland convenes builders, researchers, and defence innovators in Warsaw for a weekend dedicated to rapid experimentation and practical problem-solving. The event strengthens regional collaboration while showcasing Poland’s growing role in Europe’s defence tech ecosystem.

EDTH Munich

Munich, Germany | June 26–28, 2026 Hosted in one of Europe’s leading deep-tech and industrial hubs, EDTH Munich brings together engineers, founders, and operators to develop cutting-edge defence and resilience technologies. The event celebrates the growing momentum of Europe’s defence innovation community through hands-on collaboration and rapid prototyping.

EDTH London

London, UK | June 26–28, 2026 EDTH London gathers the UK’s leading builders, technologists, and defence innovators for a collaborative weekend focused on solving real-world security challenges. The hackathon connects talent across startups, academia, and industry to accelerate the development of next-generation defence capabilities.