British founder Max Buchan raises $50M from US giant NEA to build the sovereign infrastructure layer AI-era governments can’t ignore — TFN

• Valarian, the London-based sovereign infrastructure company founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin, has raised $50 million in a Series A led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total funding to $70 million.

• The round marks NEA’s first defence and dual-use investment in Europe — a significant signal from a firm with $35 billion under management that has previously backed Salesforce, Cloudflare, and Databricks.

• European defence spending reached €392 billion in 2025, and Western governments are accelerating investment in AI infrastructure they actually control — a market Valarian is positioning itself to own.

When senior US government officials discussed plans to strike Yemen on Signal — a consumer messaging app — the story made headlines for the breach. What it really exposed was something more structural: the absence of a governance layer between high-consequence operations and the infrastructure they depend on.

Max Buchan has been building the answer since 2020. The British founder, a Forbes Under 30 Europe alumnus with a background in international finance, co-founded Valarian with Josh McLaughlin, a former US Army Special Forces officer who spent 12 years at Palantir leading operations in high-risk environments. Today the company announced $50 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total funding raised to $70 million.

The infrastructure gap no one fixed

Valarian builds the control layer for organisations running AI and critical workloads in environments where sovereignty is non-negotiable. Its core platform, ACRA, sits beneath critical applications — encrypted communications, secure data transfer, local AI deployment — and enforces workload-level governance at the infrastructure layer itself. Every application, AI system, and operational workload deployed on top inherits that control automatically. The organisation retains full visibility over how systems communicate, what they access, and where data flows — without depending on the model provider, cloud vendor, or software layer above.

The company operates through 2 deployment tracks: Valarian Enterprise, serving banks, pharmaceutical companies, airlines, and other regulated organisations; and Valarian Defence, serving NATO member states and sovereign defence programmes. Valarian has 31 employees and is headquartered in London. Its previous round — a $7 million seed co-led by Artis Ventures, an early Palantir backer, and Scout Ventures — closed in May 2025.

“The intelligence layer of Western institutions is consolidating: quietly, contract by contract, department by department, into systems those institutions do not control,” said Buchan. “We built Valarian because sovereignty isn’t a feature you can add later. It’s architecture you have to build from the ground up.”

Why NEA crossed the Atlantic

New Enterprise Associates, founded in 1977 and managing more than $35 billion in assets, has backed some of the most consequential infrastructure companies of the last 4 decades — Salesforce, Workday, Cloudflare, Databricks, and Coursera among them. Its 2025 portfolio included ElevenLabs and Synthesia, both at $180 million Series C and D respectively. Choosing Valarian as its first European defence and dual-use investment is a pointed statement about where NEA believes the AI infrastructure stack is heading.

“The critical question of the AI era isn’t which model wins — it’s who controls the environment intelligence operates inside,” said Mustafa Neemuchwala, Partner at NEA. “Valarian answers that question with genuine defence-grade architecture.”

Lightbank, XTX Markets, Sequel, and LitVC also participated in the round, alongside angel investors Gokul Rajaram and Nikesh Arora — the former SoftBank CEO and current Palo Alto Networks chairman. The round also drew explicit support from the UK government: Kanishka Narayan, UK Minister for AI and Online Safety, cited Valarian by name, describing it as a “pioneering British firm” building solutions that will “deliver a safer and stronger Britain.”

The market and the competition

As TFN has reported, the UK has committed £500 million through its Sovereign AI Fund, with the first batch of supported companies announced in April 2026. The sovereign infrastructure category is forming quickly around a small number of well-capitalised players.Cosine, backed by Lakestar and Y Combinator, is building a sovereign frontier AI model co-designed with Babcock, BT, Lloyds, and NatWest. Augur raised $15 million from Plural for sovereign AI perception across critical infrastructure. Palantir remains the category’s dominant incumbent, valued at over $300 billion and widely deployed across NATO governments.

Valarian’s differentiation is architectural. Rather than building applications or models, it controls the layer beneath them — making it complementary to some competitors and a structural alternative to others. Where Palantir builds intelligence tools for governments, Valarian builds the infrastructure those tools run on. Where Cosine builds the sovereign model, Valarian governs the environment it operates inside.

The $50 million gives Buchan the capital to prove that thesis at scale — at precisely the moment Western governments are deciding whether AI sovereignty is a preference or a requirement. The answer to that question will determine how large this market becomes, and how quickly.