Good afternoon from Resilience Media.
The much-anticipated Lakestar ‘Resilience I’ fund was announced late last week, providing a massive $300M in capital to deploy to defence tech across Europe. Combined with Expeditions recently announced €197M ($225M) fund, we don’t see defence tech venture investment slowing down anytime soon.
Lakestar’s move into defence tech is a blueprint for other funds hindered by LPAs where ESG provisions make investment into the space impossible. Previously a generalist investor making early stage startup investments since 2012, Klaus Hommels (pictured above at Resilience Conference 2025) began investing in defence tech as an angel in 2017. Notable investments include Helsing, Cambridge Aerospace, ISAR Aerospace, and ARX Robotics which all now live within the Lakestar portfolio.
(Klaus invested in Resilience Media as an angel, as did the founders of Expeditions. Their individual support of our company does not impact our editorial decisions or reporting of their work.)
Resilience Conference returns to London on 5-6 October. Early Bird ticket pricing ends at midnight GMT on July 31.
Join us in October and hear from Erik Balck Sørensen, CIO of EIFO – Export and Investment Fund of Denmark; Sven Kruck Co-CEO, Quantum-Systems GmbH; Ari Jonsson, President, NATO Innovation Fund; Eric Slesinger, Managing Partner, 201 Ventures; James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Strategy and Policy, Cyber and Digital Transformation, NATO; Kusti Salm, CEO, Frankenburg Technologies; Nicola Sinclair, General Partner, Twin Track Ventures; Srđan Kovačević, CEO, Orqa; Lars Reger, CTO, NXP Semiconductors. More speakers will be announced over the coming weeks. Get your ticket today.
UKRAINE: Our team continues to follow the Ukrainian MoD shakeup, which has seen the removal of both the Minister of Defence and Commander-in-Chief Armed Forces in one week.
- The Ukrainian defence tech ecosystem reacts to Mykhailo Fedorov’s firing
- Kyiv-based Reporter Luke Smith provides analysis on what newly-appointed commander-in-chief General Mykhailo Drapatyi’s appointment means for the Ukrainian defence forces
DEALS: Perhaps the summer slowdown is finally here, as there were only two investments announced last week. We break down Greenjets $40M Series A and the Singularity $80M Series A in our Deals section below.
GUEST POST: Resilience Media Columnist and EDT Partner Hugo Jammes latest piece is a deeply personal interview with his grandfather, John Jammes, a 99-year-old veteran of the French Resistance. Read an excerpt of ‘Never Despair’ below in our Guest Post section. We loved it.
Elsewhere on Resilience Media:
- Anduril unveils Thunder, a new autonomous ‘attack rotorcraft’
- Wes Streeting takes Defence brief and Healey moves to the Treasury
I’ll be back in your inboxes next week. Thanks for reading.
-Leslie Hitchcock, co-founder and Publisher, Resilience Media
DEALS 💰
Greenjets secures $40m Series A backed by NATO Innovation Fund
- Greenjets has raised a $40 million (£30 million) Series A as the British aerospace company scales production of propulsion and aircraft technologies amid growing demand for sovereign defence capabilities across Europe.
- The round was led by Blossom Capital, with participation from the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), Tanglin Ventures, and NSFO Family Office.
- The investment comes just days after Greenjets was selected alongside Cambridge Aerospace and Frankenburg Technologies under the Ministry of Defence’s Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors (LCADE) programme to develop a British low-cost drone interceptor.
Singularity steps into the light with $80 million Series A to protect humans from cheap modern warfare
- US defence startup Singularity has emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed $80 million Series A round at a $400 million valuation, as it looks to bring low-cost air defence systems into large-scale production.
- The round was led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis, with participation from seed investors AE Ventures and NEA, alongside Long Journey, Harpoon, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, Decisive Point, New Vista, Sunflower, and Soma.
- The company was founded by CEO Jack Oswald and COO Shail Giroux after a visit to Ukraine convinced Oswald that the growing threat from inexpensive drones and loitering munitions had exposed a fundamental gap in modern air defence.
GUEST POST ✍️
Never Despair: Lessons in resilience from one of the last surviving members of the French Resistance
Hugo Jammes, Columnist
Those who know me know that my grandfather is one of my all-time heroes. Born in 1926, he is one of the last living veterans of the French Resistance and a recipient of the Croix de Guerre.
John came of age in a family for whom service was not a political abstraction but a lived inheritance.
When occupation came in 1940, he was thirteen years old. He began by distributing Resistance leaflets through his school, graduated to running clandestine messages across the countryside by bicycle under curfew, and by the summer of 1944 had joined the Maquis – the armed guerrilla units – fighting alongside his father (a French Infantry Officer) in the countryside around Loches. He ambushed German convoys, documented war crimes whose photographs were later used at the Nuremberg trials, and rescued and sheltered downed Allied airmen. By the end of the war, his unit had captured over 80 German soldiers.
This was all before the age of 18. For decades, he declined to speak publicly about his wartime service, fearing he would not be taken seriously. It was only in his later years, watching his surviving comrades disappear, that he concluded silence had become a disservice to the dead. He is 99 years old and now lives in the UK.
Hugo: John, you’ve been reluctant to speak about your wartime experience for much of your life. Why?
John Jammes: For a very long time I was afraid no one would take me seriously. You tell stories of what happened and people look at you – they are polite, they nod – but you can see that some part of them thinks you are shooting a line. Exaggerating. Performing the old soldier. It took me decades to feel comfortable speaking. What eventually changed was watching my comrades die, one by one, and realising that when they went, their stories went with them. At that point, it became a duty. Not a pleasure – a duty.
Your father was a French officer. He was warning of war with Germany as early as 1937. What do you remember of that period?
He was quite clear about it, not least having served in the First World War and continued serving in the intervening period. He had studied the situation, he understood German rearmament, he understood what Hitler represented. And the politicians around him – in France, in Britain, everywhere – simply could not accept the reality. They looked at the same evidence and concluded the opposite. It wasn’t stupidity, exactly. It was a kind of willed blindness. The truth was too unpleasant, so they chose not to see it.
