What 100+ Defence Tech Startup Applications Reveal About Europe’s Next Wave of Innovation – Resilience Media

LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference is our showcase for the most exciting early-stage startups in defence, security, and resilience, where they launch products or come out of stealth in front of the investors, primes, and military leaders in our audience. This year, Resilience Conference returns to London on 5-6 October. Learn more here.

The showcase was built on the expertise our team developed over a decade running the Startup Battlefield pitch event at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, and around the world, which saw companies like Dropbox, Fitbit, and Cloudflare launch publicly as very early stage startups. We use this expertise, supplemented by a range of defence investors and advisors, to select the most important new companies in the defence and wider resilience sector.

We created LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference in 2024 with a first cohort of six startups from the US, Germany, and the UK, spanning drone protection, intelligent video collection, resilient edge data processing, GPS-free navigation, and advanced smartphone privacy tools.

Among them was Alpine Eagle, the Munich-based counter-drone startup that used LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference to unveil an early version of Sentinel, its airborne counter-UAS system.

Since they were on our stage, they have raised a €10.25 million seed round led by IQ Capital, with General Catalyst, HCVC, HTGF, Expeditions Fund, and Sentris Capital. They landed the German Bundeswehr as a lead customer, ran trials in Ukraine, added three more European customers, expanded into the UK and the Netherlands, and grew the team from 12 people in 2024 to 50 today, with 100 targeted by the end of the year.

In 2025, our second LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference cohort expanded to seven companies. This included Isembard, the precision-manufacturing startup building AI-run factories for aerospace, defence, and robotics components. Isembard went on to raise a £7 million seed round in April 2025 and returned less than a year later with a $50 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, with Tamarack Global and IQ Capital joining existing backers Notion Capital and CIV. Its customers already include Anduril, Tekever, ARX Robotics and Allen Control Systems, and it is using this latest investment to open 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France and Ukraine by the end of this year.

Like our previous pitch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference has become a crucial opportunity for investors and end users to see the companies that will grow into market leaders.

LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference 2026

LAUNCH @ Resilience Conference is now established as a key part of the defence tech calendar, and this was made clear to us when we received over 100 applications to be on the stage at Resilience Conference 2026 — a reminder of how much startups value the chance to pitch to the investors and end users we convene at our conference. This year, we also received a large number of applications from companies that have already raised in excess of 10m Euros, as well as the earlier stage companies.

We have sent out invitation letters and will announce who we have selected soon. In the meantime, here is a snapshot of what the whole list looks like. It provides some interesting insights into what is happening at the earlier stage of the ecosystem at the moment.

We are really pleased to see startups from so many different countries apply to be on our stage in London. We see the London conference as our international event, and this reinforces the view that the UK has a unique position bridging between Europe and the US.

The applications also reflect the topics that are attracting strong founders and investment. Robotics, autonomy, and AI combined make up over half the applications, reflecting the importance of this area to defence in a tech-enabled battlefield.

Five of the applicants trace directly back to university research, with spin-outs from TalTech, ETH Zürich, the University of Birmingham, the University of Oxford, and the Technical University of Denmark. This is a reminder that Europe’s research base is still translating into fieldable defence technology.

Military service is another recurring thread, with one in seven applications having a military founder, including from Israeli Navy Special Operations, Norwegian Special Forces, a US Navy submarine Commander, a number of former British Army officers, and a former Ukrainian Brigade Commander.

On funding, applicants have already drawn on well over 100 distinct named investors, angel networks and non-dilutive programmes between them, including Nato Diana and Nato Innovation Fund, the European Defence Fund, EIC Accelerator, DASA, Innovate UK, and Ukraine’s Brave1, alongside a long list of European and US venture funds.