We knew about the magical, never-empty American defense tech funding tap, but it turns out Europe has one too.
This morning, European deep tech VC heavyweight Lakestar announced that it’s raised a $300M Resilience Fund I—dedicated specifically to defense and dual-use in Europe and across NATO-allied countries.
“The dedicated Resilience I fund gives us the capital and the focus to partner with founders who have chosen to solve the hardest problems in the most consequential category of our time,” Klaus Hommels, founder and chairman of Lakestar, said in a statement. “The strong valuation uplifts we have already seen in our resilience portfolio confirm that markets recognise the scope of the transformation underway to protect Europe’s prosperity, resilience, and security.”
Lakestar says it currently has over $6B AUM and that Resilience I was raised entirely from “private capital, including leading strategic and institutional investors as well as large industrial family offices.”
The fund will also have an advisory board made up of Gen. Sir Nicholas Carter (former Chief of the Defence Staff of the UK), Gen. Volker Wieker (former Generalinspekteur of the German Bundeswehr), Mike Pompeo (former US Secretary of State), and Baroness Martha Lane Fox (tech entrepreneur and British crossbench peer).
Well, things are seriously heating up across the pond.
Old hat: Lakestar is practically ancient in European defense tech terms. The fund was founded by Hommels back in 2012 (after he spent a while investing out of his personal vehicle, Hommels Holding), and started investing in defense (or at least defense-adjacent companies) nearly a year ago.
- Lakestar led Auterion’s $10M seed round back in 2018.
- They then led ISAR Aerospace’s 75M Series B in 2020, followed by Aleph Alpha’s €23M Series A in 2021.
- By early 2022, Lakestar was already leaning into the European resilience thing, but after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the fund went full tilt.
- Hommels also served as the inaugural chair of the NATO Innovation Fund from 2023 until he stepped down in late 2025.
In good company: Since that defense-y resilience shift back in 2022, Lakestar has made some pretty impressive investments, including:
- Helsing: Got in around 2021 in Helsing’s Series A
- ARX Robotics: Got into the seed round in 2024
- UForce: Joined the Series A in March 2026
- Frankenburg Technologies
- Kela
- Kraken Technology
- Onodrim Industries
- Tekever
Per Lakestar, founders in the Resilience portfolio (of which these companies are all part) have raised over $5B in private capital and have generated “several billion” USD in revenue.
“Sovereignty and Europe’s capabilities in critical technologies are a core concern for all of us,” Hommels said. “Europe and its Western allies need sovereign technology capital in the defence and dual-use sectors. At Lakestar, we have backed founders in this space for almost a decade, well before it became a consensus view.”