Lol guys. I think we might have to reconsider the whole Series-based funding scale pretty soon.
This morning, “European defence and industrial scale-up platform” (read: fancy rollup) Onodrim announced that it’s raised a $300M Series A at a $1.3B valuation, led by Lux Capital.
- General Catalyst, Lakestar, Altimeter, Strike Capital, 137 Ventures, 8090, Expeditions, and others also joined the round.
The idea is to use this small fortune to “acquire established businesses across aerospace and defence, and industrial manufacturing” across Europe.
- When Onodrim snaps up a smaller company, they’ll take a controlling stake and “[apply] cutting-edge technology, operational and business development expertise to accelerate [its] growth.”
- It basically sounds like PE combined with the new-age holding company model spearheaded by companies like fellow-Tolkien-named Valinor. Buy up companies making cool stuff (PE style), but then combine them into a more efficient, super-mega defense company spanning Europe, rather than selling them.
- CEO Aistis Šimaitis told Tectonic that this round will be used to “execute [their] first set of acquisitions.” They’re in talks with ten companies, and the funding could (at least in theory) finance all ten deals, co-founder Christian Garrett added in an interview.
“Europe’s critical industries – from manufacturing to industrials to commercial aerospace and of course defence – consist of some of the best businesses in the world. We want to build a new type of company to scale them up in order [to] strengthen Europe’s defence and industrial foundations,” Garrett wrote on X.
“In the past, we all forget the 10-100B businesses that were built like HEICO, Teledyne, Honeywell, Karman, and of course TransDigm. You’ve seen pure defense roll-ups like Blue Halo or Ignium. Nothing like this has been built in Europe at scale,” he added in a separate post.
Fruit rollup: Now, rumors about Onodrim have been swirling around in Europe for a while now, but the company officially emerged from stealth with a €40M ($48M) funding round and a promise to basically build a better way of, well, building stuff back in February 2026.
- Back then, the company said it would combine software and advanced manufacturing to improve production (especially defense production) across Europe. Garrett said that the roll-up move was always the plan, but they had to announce their seed first.
- The company was founded by Garrett and Palantir alumni Šimaitis and Alexander Blessing (CTO). Garrett is also a partner at 137 Ventures and a co-founder of the Hill and Valley forum.
Built better: It sounds a lot like over the past ten-ish months, the company has looked at European industry and determined that the best way to build stuff better is to buy up the people actually building the stuff. (Sorry. We’ll stop with the alliterations soon. It’s a Monday, we’re having fun.)
“The thing that we learned is…that Europe has very vibrant commercial aerospace, industrials, manufacturing, and, obviously, defense sectors, but it’s extremely fragmented,” Garrett told Tectonic. “Most of the defense industrial base is a long tail of smaller companies.”
The plan now to buy up a bunch of those smaller companies (especially component suppliers), make them better-slash-more-efficient, and help to supply larger primes and neoprimes. Here’s how the whole thing is slated to work:
- They’ll acquire “dual-use businesses in critical industries across supply chains, services, and products that solve major bottlenecks for the European defence industry,” per a company statement.
- Onodrim will provide the capital (and the network) to start clearing those bottlenecks. On the business side, the company’s centralized “capital, operational, business development, and technology resources” help its portfolio companies grow, while its engineering teams “can develop new products and modernize manufacturing and operations.”
“We’ll be set up as a really long-term holding company where we will buy these businesses, integrate them, deploy technology into them, and scale them,” Garrett said. “We want to build a bunch of capabilities…across industries.”
Mom-and-pop shops: A big focus for the team, per Garrett and Šimaitis, is on the small companies building mission-critical bits and bobs.
“The suppliers and services ecosystem really is very fragmented in Europe, and that’s a big area of focus, Garrett said. “We will also look at smaller capabilities on the defense side.”
“We’re not focused on building drones, cruise missiles, or platforms,” he added. “Those are our customers and partners…We’re sort of going to solve the next layer of the problem, which is the rest of the industrial base.”
Across the pond: We asked Garrett and Šimaitis why the focus on Europe. Essentially, they said it’s because a new-age-rollup-holding-company like this hasn’t really been built on the continent before.
“Most of the money has flooded into the sexy parts of the ecosystem, where our friends are,” Garrett said. “We’re focused on something that has long been forgotten—massive businesses built around these conglomerates combining a bunch of smaller capabilities and systems and scaling them up.”
Plus, there’s like, the war of it all.
“There is a full-scale war happening in Europe, and to prevent it from expanding even more and to defend Europe, this has to happen,” Šimaitis said. “Europe needs to strengthen its defense industrial base in order to, first, avoid further conflict and hopefully stop the ongoing one.”
