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Good afternoon from the team at Resilience Media.
We’ve been watching hypersonic technologies closely at Resilience Media: with Zach Shore, President of Hermeus, and Philip Kerth, CEO of Hypersonica appearing on our stage at Resilience Conference 2025. The need to include hypersonic capabilities in NATO militaries became even more clear following the November 2024 Russian Oreshnik missile attack on Ukraine. Founders and investors are responding to the urgency.
After appearing on our stage as part of the second Launch at Resilience Conference cohort, Hypersonica announced a Series A round led by Plural and SPRIND. Hermeus showed successful ground tests for its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 engine in a video released last week. Contributor Tom Pashby has been reporting on hypersonics and kinetics for Resilience Media; an excerpt of their most recent piece which examines the threat from Russian and Chinese advancements in the space is in the Hypersonics section below.
It’s been another big week for deals. Ukrainian startups Farsight Vision and The Fourth Law both raised from Axon, SatVu brought in £30M to take its thermal satellite constellation technology even further into the defence space, and Terra raised another $22M to keep scaling the first African prime.
There were a lot of partnership announcements coming events alongside the Munich Security Conference. Notably, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in attendance, signifying their importance to the defence of democracy: Auterion and Airlogix announced their manufacturing agreement in a signing ceremony and Quantum Frontline Systems held a factory opening.
Lastly, EDT Ventures General Partner Hugo Jammes is back with his monthly column, this time inspired by the book If Russia Wins. In this piece, Jammes examines the book and Munich Security Conference through the lens of public policy, the role of private and venture capital, and continental willingness to deter aggression. An excerpt is in the Column section below.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- Taiwan gets serious about tech at sea
- Helsing’s second German Resilience factory is live
- Biometric wearables company Aware gets $7.5 million program increase from the U.S. Army
- Ukraine planning a national mobile carrier for military use
We are starting to announce speakers for our Resilience Conference events this year, starting with Resilience Conference Warsaw, where we are thrilled to bring to the stage Jan-Hendrik Boelens, CEO and founder of Alpine Eagle and Klaus Hommels, Founder and Chairman of Lakestar. Tickets are already going fast, so get yours today before Early Bird prices end. I’ll be back in your inboxes next week. Thanks for reading.
-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media
Tom Pashby, Contributor
The advent of hypersonic weapons – a broad category covering systems that travel at Mach 5+ including hypersonic boost glide systems, hypersonic cruise missiles and ballistic missiles – has opened a new front in anxieties about national security and defence in the West.
The anxiety is due to a combination of issues: a lack of current, deployed hypersonic weapons capability by NATO member states; acknowledgement that existing interception systems are ineffective against hypersonic targets; and the threat that some hypersonic weapons, designed for conventional warheads, can be interchangeably armed with nuclear capability.
While Russia did not put nuclear warheads on the Oreshnik hypersonic missile it fired at a Ukrainian military facility in November 2024, it did follow nuclear convention when setting it off, in order to jangle nerves: Moscow provided Washington with a 30 minute-notice of its launch, according to Reuters.
Russia’s efforts to ratchet up fear should not be underestimated. In January 2026 at a meeting of the UN Security Council, the US and UK criticised a more recent deployment of the Oreshnik by Russia. At the time, the Guardian reported that James Kariuki, the UK’s acting ambassador to the UN, said the attack threatened “regional and international security and carries significant risk of escalation and miscalculation.”
And a research paper published by the Nuclear Study Group at the Munich Security Conference this month underscored the intention of that latest strike.
In the MSC’s view of the latest long-range allegedly hypersonic missile, “Although the initial strike caused limited physical damage, the employment of a dual-use system with a reported range of up to 5,500 km was widely interpreted as a signal to Ukraine’s Western allies and as part of a broader campaign of psychological warfare,” the authors wrote.
If Russia Wins: Lessons for the UK and Europe
Hugo Jammes, Columnist
In the build-up to the Munich Security Conference (MSC), I finally read a book many had recommended. Carlo Masala’s ‘If Russia Wins’ is not simply a geopolitical thriller. It is a sharp warning to the West – a warning that reverberated through the MSC in soundbites and narratives.
The novel imagines a near-future scenario where, after securing a form of “peace” in Ukraine, Russia tests NATO by seizing the Estonian city of Narva and the island of Hiiumaa in 2028. Masala’s central message is unequivocal: Western complacency is a strategic liability, and deterrence only works when it is underpinned by political will, industrial capacity, and societal resilience.
For the UK and Europe, the book’s scenario acts as a stress test of current assumptions. It forces a confrontation with the gap between rhetoric and capability, highlighting the uncomfortable reality that adversaries exploit hesitation and uncertainty.
This article distils Masala’s cautionary tale into three domains: public policy, the role of private and venture capital, and continental willingness to deter aggression.
The key messages from the MSC find a chilling echo in the novel. Both the conference and the book analyse a world where the post-1945 order has collapsed, replaced by a “multi- polarisation” that favours aggression over international law.
The ultimate conclusion of both the conference and the novel is that the peace Europeans take for granted is “contingent and fragile.” Inaction is no longer an option; survival requires immediate, decisive strategic effort rather than “complacent dialogue.”
