Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media
Last week, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) announced the addition of two new partners, signalling it is doubling down on its Deep Tech investment thesis. Joining founding partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky are Dr. Ulrich Quay and Sander Verbrugge, bringing with them expertise in mobility, AI, manufacturing, semiconductors, and hardware — all relevant to NIF’s mandate to help their startups scale across the Alliance. With this announcement was the news that founding partner Kelly Chen is leaving to start her own fund. Chris O’Connor, another former founding partner, also left in the last few months to launch a fund.
This is all great news for an ecosystem that was relatively nascent when NIF was founded, with its directives and team formed prior to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was said on LinkedIn this week that our ecosystem needs to remember that building and scaling a business is hard, and even more difficult when one has the NATO brand acting like a target on its back. We at Resilience Media are looking forward to seeing what Schneider-Sikorsky, Quay, and Verbrugge will do as they continue to deploy the €1bn in capital that NIF has in its coffers. You can read our piece on this here.
This week we published our first in an occasional series of European defence clusters, starting with Riihimäki, Finland. You can read our piece in the Dispatches From section below. Expeditions Partner, Samuel Burrell returns with another essay, this time drawing comparisons between drone operations and Ancient Greece. Read it below in our Industry Essay section.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- British manufacturing startup Isembard opens first US factory in Texas
- Quadsat Raises €5M to Scale Battlefield Spectrum Intelligence
- Wartime Makes ‘Odd’ Bedfellows In Danish-Ukrainian Partnership
Resilience Conference Speaker Announcement
With only 2 days left until our Early Bird ticket sales end, we are very excited to welcome to our speaker lineup Dr Klaus Hommels, Founder & Chairman of Lakestar and Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural. Both need no introduction, but we’ll give them one anyway.
Klaus Hommels is one of Europe’s leading business angels and venture capitalists. He is also a prominent voice for the European Tech Ecosystem with the aim of strengthening Europe’s sovereignty in times of digital transformation. An early investor at Helsing and Isar Aerospace, we’re particularly excited to bring his perspective as a passionate advocate of the European Tech Ecosystem, as well as digital and technical European sovereignty.
Sten Tamkivi is a partner at Plural, the early-stage venture capital fund that backs the most ambitious founders on a mission to change the world through technology. He’s led early investments in a range of frontier tech, robotics, defence and AI companies, including Labrys. We love Plural’s unique approach to investing, given the operator backgrounds of its partners. We can’t wait to hear from Sten in September.
-Leslie, co-founder, Resilience Media
Situated 69 kilometres north of Helsinki and 109 kilometres southeast of Tampere, Riihimäki was long defined by its railway junction connecting Finland’s major cities, historically all the way through to Saint Petersburg in Russia. But amid growing caution of its eastern neighbour, the small Finnish town drawing attention as a home to a fledgling defence cluster.
Jouni Eho, a retired professional basketball player who has been Riihimäki’s mayor since 2022, has driven this transformation against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine and Finland’s closer alignment with NATO.
His aim: to build a coordinated ecosystem that taps existing local strength — Riihimäki has been a garrison town since the beginning of the twentieth century, and is now home to strategic units such as the Electronic Warfare Training Centre, as well as defence companies, including significant rifle manufacturing and military maintenance facilities — but also draws in external talent to strengthen both Finland and NATO’s wider security capabilities. Read the full piece here.
Samuel Burrell, Partner at Expeditions, returns with another insightful guest post: “Pete Hegseth, the Battle for Troy, and Remote Drone Operations”
I recently watched Pete Hegseth’s viral video, posted on X, in which he announces a Pentagon memo ‘Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance’. Although he stumbles through the delivery, the video is worth a watch – not least for its fusion of news anchor showmanship with government process.
It got me thinking about the future of drone warfare. That, in turn, got me thinking about the history of the Royal Air Force.
In 1918 the United Kingdom was the first country in the world to create an independent air force, the RAF. It was born at the end of the First World War as rapid technological progress, iterated in the skies above the battlefield, turned a civilian curiosity into a devastating military capability. Air superiority would go on to be a decisive factor in all subsequent conflicts. Read the rest of Sam’s essay here.
Cybersecurity
APT28 Hackers Introduce First Known LLM-Powered Malware, Integrating AI into Attack Methods
Europe
Time to Supercharge Europe’s Innovation Ecosystem
Startups
Operationalizing Asymmetric Deterrence: Aligning Startups, Investors, and Government
What Drones Can—and Cannot—Do on the Battlefield
USA
An Industrial Policy With American Characteristics
