Expeditions, the Warsaw-based venture firm backed by BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, has closed a €197m ($225m) fund to back the next wave of European defence startups.
The raise caps a boom that has seen defence prime BAE commit €50M to outside VCs and venture capital pour into the continent's defence tech at record speed.
The vehicle, Expeditions Fund II, overshot an earlier €150m target, boosted by BAE's €25m cheque. The firm plans to deploy the capital across as many as 40 early-stage companies building technologies with, in its words, immediate operational relevance to Europe's critical capability gaps.
Expeditions frames its thesis around sovereignty. The goal, it says, is to develop military technologies that Europe can build and control itself, rather than importing them, as the continent scrambles to close capability gaps exposed by the war in Ukraine.
Founded in 2021 by Dr Mikolaj Firlej and Stanislaw Kastory, Expeditions invests at the intersection of security and deep tech. Its remit spans dual-use fields including cybersecurity, intelligence, autonomy, AI, quantum, communications, and space.
The firm is no newcomer to the category. It says it has backed almost 30% of the 30 most well-funded defence startups in Europe, with Fund I names including Alpine Eagle, Comand AI, Nu Quantum, and Labrys.
The LP roster reads like a who's who of European tech money. Alongside BAE and the NATO Innovation Fund sit Poland's state-backed Polish Development Fund and a clutch of early executives from Skype, Wise, Bolt, and Snowflake.
BAE's own involvement is the twist. The UK's largest defence company put €25m into Expeditions and another €25m into Klaus Hommels' Lakestar, the second stage of its Launchpad programme.
Launchpad is deliberately two-way. It is designed both to spin BAE's own laboratory technology out into commercial startups and to back outside founders who might bring something new to defence, as the group's commercialisation chief Dave Ewing put it.
For a prime contractor, becoming a limited partner is a hedge as much as a gift. Better to own a slice of the fast-moving companies now minting defence unicorns like Berlin's Stark than to be blindsided by them, while offering founders access to BAE's customers across defence, energy, and manufacturing.
Firlej framed the stakes bluntly when the BAE deal was unveiled in June. “Our security can no longer be assumed; it has to be built,” he said, arguing its architects would be founders shipping products in weeks and months rather than years.
The timing is deliberate. Russia's war on Ukraine and the EU's ReArm Europe plan, which aims to mobilise up to €800bn, have turned defence tech from a VC taboo into its hottest category, pulling in space and dual-use startups that once shunned military work.
Expeditions is far from alone. Lakestar has been raising a roughly $300m defence vehicle, and the NATO Innovation Fund has been seeding a roster of specialist defence VCs across the alliance.
The numbers behind that shift are striking. European defence, security, and resilience startups raised a record $8.7bn in 2025, according to Dealroom and the NATO Innovation Fund, nearly double the previous year.
What comes next is deployment. Expeditions has already started writing cheques from Fund II, backing companies such as Lendurai and Orasio, and the €197m war chest gives it room to move fast as governments across the continent rearm. The firm says it backs founders for the long term, offering patient capital alongside its team's operational expertise.
For a fund conceived in 2021, before the current gold rush, the close is a vindication. The harder test, as ever in venture, is whether the startups it backs can turn sovereign ambition into deployed capability. Governments are the customers now, and they are writing bigger cheques than ever.