Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media
It’s been a big week for European defence tech.
Yesterday, stealth startup STARK revealed its first product: the OWE-V, an AI-guided strike drone designed from the ground up for the drone war era. Developed with Ukrainian and NATO forces, Managing Director of STARK International, Philip Lockwood, chatted with us more about the drone, which can launch vertically, strike targets up to 100 kilometres away, and operate under heavy electronic warfare pressure. “We…cannot be complacent about the status quo: our solutions need to evolve at the rapid pace of innovation seen in both hardware and software. The OWE-V reflects [STARK’s] commitment to constant innovation to meet our operators’ needs,” he says. Read the full piece here, and hear more from Philip when he speaks at Resilience Conference in September.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- Startup Watch: WaveAerospace’s Heavy-Lift Drone Gets Real-World Army Test
- Anduril Is Quietly Building the Future of Maritime Warfare
- Friend of Resilience Media, Dame Fiona Murray, speaks up about the need for the venture capital community to be less squeamish about defence tech investing
Don’t forget to take a look at the Industry Events section below. We’ll be on site at all of these events as a media partner. Drop us a line to set up time to meet if you’re there, too.
-Leslie, co-founder, Resilience Media
Defence startup WaveAerospace is making a push into frontline logistics with its new VTOL drone, the MULE — a multi-mission platform that just wrapped up field testing with the U.S. Army at Fort Irwin under Project Convergence-Capstone 5 (PC-C5).
For early-stage founders in defence, this is the kind of milestone that matters: not just a product demo, but real-world validation in operational conditions. The MULE was designed from day one with one thing in mind — contested logistics. The company’s pitch is simple: ground supply lines are vulnerable, traditional UAVs can’t handle real payloads, and existing military logistics infrastructure wasn’t built for autonomy. Read more here.
Could an enemy inject propaganda into our educational system, our art, our scientific literature? With artificial intelligence, those fears are no longer hypothetical. We now have real-world examples of people using large language models to flood the internet with false narratives. But a new report from the American Sunlight Project outlines something even more troubling: disinformation isn’t just being produced by AI, it’s being trained by it.
The report calls this phenomenon LLM grooming, and if you care about democracy, information integrity, or even just being able to trust what you read online, you should read more here.
UK – Ukraine Defence Tech Forum
25 April 2025, RUSI, London. Ukrainian and UK defence tech companies are developing their technologies and their effectiveness is being proven on the frontline. What is required now is to channel investment to enable rapid scaling-up and the advancement of these technologies in order to speed up their deployment. The Forum has been convened to bring together all key stakeholders – government, technology companies and VCs – for a timely discussion on how to achieve this.
Resilience Media readers receive a 25% discount on the registration fee. When registering on the Forum webpage simply enter the code Resilience25.
London Defence Tech Hackathon May 2025
10 May 2025, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Our friends at Future Forces, Isembard and EDTH are hosting the 2nd London Defence Tech Hackathon to connect the UK’s brightest young engineering minds with cutting-edge startups, venture capitalists, and U.K. defence and national security leadership and users. Apply here.
Latitude59
May 21-23, 2025, Tallinn, Estonia. Latitude59 is the flagship startup and tech event from Estonia, running since 2012. In recent years, it has grown into a global platform, connecting ecosystems, communities and innovators who change the world and make it a better place. Resilience Media is proud to be a media partner for this year’s event, and we’re pleased to see more focus on defence and security at the conference. Register to attend here.
Investing
Inside General Catalyst, European tech’s kingmaker
The Former C.I.A. Officer Capitalizing on Europe’s Military Spending Boom
Europe
How Europe hopes to turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine”
NATO picks Palantir’s Maven AI for military planning, amid trans-Atlantic tension
Ukraine thinks it can hold off Russia as long as it needs to
National Security
The Japanese Military Has a People Problem
Startups
AI Defense Startup Helsing Draws Fire For Tech and Tactics
DIU selects 8 ‘eligible’ companies for nuclear microreactors that could power US bases
From bureaucracy to battle: Increase direct funding to combatant commanders
