The Defense Brief

Helsing, The Exploration Company, Hypersonica, Frankenburg, Augur, Proxima Fusion: Khaled Helioui and his partners at Plural are behind a good share of the European companies people now call obvious. He committed to Helsing in 2020, before the company was formally set up, after watching cheap drones make expensive equipment ineffective in Armenia.

Anduril, Babcock, Tekever and ARX all have something in common: they buy their parts from Isembard. The company just opened the largest factory London has seen since the Second World War.I sat down with Alexander Fitzgerald to discuss why he is building the first software-first factory, why manufacturing is the rate limiter on everything, and what the modern franchisee looks like.

Castelion, Saronic, Impulse Space, Hadrian, Firestorm Labs — Jackson Moses backed all of them, solo, out of Dallas, starting when defense wasn't investable. Fund two closed this year at $85M.In this episode: what he screens founders on. What the first Castelion meeting felt like, when three SpaceX veterans said they could build hypersonics and every VC said no. Why program of record is the only thing that matters in defense. And what Europe would have to do to get a check from him.

For twenty years, Alex Ferrara bet on the winners of the internet economy. At Bessemer, he led Shopify's Series A and backed companies like Pipedrive. Then, a little over a year ago, he published a piece announcing he was going all in on European defense.In this episode, we get into what he saw coming: why European resilience is a generational shift and not another hype cycle. Where Europe has a right to win, What Helsing's mega-round says about king-making in defense tech. Why he bet on Auterion and why he thinks The Exploration Company culd become one of the most valuable companies in Europe.Plus, the corners of the market that are still quiet — space tech, offensive cyber, and yes, bionic cockroaches.Let’s dive in. 

"We were dreamers from the very beginning — everyone told us it was a toy."Tencore is the leading UGV company in Ukraine. Their ground robots carry water, ammunition, and wounded soldiers across the most dangerous kilometers of the front line.I first met Ronan over a year ago, when Tencore was just starting. What struck me most in our conversation is how far the story has moved since.Ukraine now wants 100% of frontline logistics done by robots. Tencore just signed the biggest UGV order in history. And for the first time, these machines aren't just supplying the front line — they're fighting on it.We talked about the robotisation of the battlefield, what it takes to build for scale under missile threat, and the joint ventures with Quantum Systems, Shark Robotics that are bringing this technology to the rest of the world.

“Ukraine will be a Silicon Valley for drones.”Sine Engineering is powering the comms backbone of Ukraine’s drone war — keeping hundreds of thousands of drones flying when GPS is jammed and the enemy is hunting every signal.Andriy Chulyk sat with me to discuss why electronic warfare (not firepower) is the real edge on the modern battlefield, how they’re scaling globally, and why they were just chosen as the first-ever investment of the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Fund.

"When global defense spend goes from two to three trillion, you don't get bigger militaries — you get a refresh of every platform."Aaron Applbaum, co-founder of Kinetica, sat with me to talk about building a new Israeli defense fund at the exact moment that refresh begins — backing founders before they've even left the army, in partnership with 8VC.We get into why October 2023 pulled Israel's best engineers back into uniform and changed what they wanted to build, and where Israel has a real right to win — from the algorithms behind information warfare to its long lead in aerial defense.

"Europe might be behind on a couple of core technologies, but let's make hypersonics ours."Philipp Kerth, co-founder and CEO of Hypersonica, sat with me to talk about what it takes to launch a hypersonic missile company at the end of a PhD, when defense was still an afterthought in most of Europe.We cover why maneuverability is the hardest problem in hypersonics, what the new generation of hypersonic systems actually changes on the battlefield, and why building an entirely European supply chain - no US components - is as much a strategic choice as a technical one.

"We're more than 10 times further than where I hoped we'd be. And we're probably one-tenth of the way to where we need to go."I sat down with Doug Beck, former director of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). He steered billions of dollars into turning Anduril and Palantir from startups into primes, and driving the Replicator initiative, the first real signal of the shift of procurement toward autonomous, expendable systems. Now, his work continues, shifting defense in Japan and in Europe.

38 years of evolution in air combat — and what the future holdsTranslated by Eleven Labs