201 Ventures
Founded in 2023 by Eric Slesinger, a former CIA officer and In-Q-Tel investor, 201 Ventures is an early stage fund dedicated to advancing freedom and autonomy in Europe. It is notably the first fund to receive institutional investment from the NATO Innovation Fund, the world's first multi-sovereign VC fund backed by 24 NATO allies. Slesinger also founded the European Defense Investor Network and organises the European Defense Tech Summit. The portfolio of eight investments includes Delian Alliance Industries (autonomous threat detection, Greece), Ionlace (Sweden), Deep Earth (Germany), and Isembard (UK), spanning hypersonics, biosecurity, subsurface mapping, maritime sensing, and Arctic autonomy.
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2 companies in our directory
Delian
HiringDelian Alliance Industries is a Greek and UK-based defence technology company building autonomous systems for NATO and allied forces. Founded by former Apple robotics engineer Dimitrios Kottas, the company takes a vertically integrated approach, developing hardware, sensor fusion, autonomy software, and strike platforms under one roof. Its products include the Lambda Autonomous Surveillance Tower (LAST), which uses video and thermal feeds to detect and track surface targets without GPS, and a pipeline of concealed sea drones. Originally launched as Lambda Automata, the company rebranded and has deployed solar-powered surveillance towers along Greek borders for security and wildfire detection. Delian is headquartered in London with offices in Athens and is positioning itself as a European defence prime for the autonomous warfare era.
Agon
Agon launched out of stealth in July 2026 with $30M across a $7M pre-seed and a $23M seed, one of the largest European defence tech seed rounds of the year. It was co-founded by chief executive Tristam Constant, who spent 13 years in British Army leadership roles before heading European defence at Applied Intuition and serving as senior director for Europe at Anduril, and Junaid Hussain, founder of defence unicorn Cambridge Aerospace and Google-backed AI and gaming company Iconic. Unity founder David Helgason chairs the company and backed the round. Agon builds synthetic battlefields where autonomous weapon systems train at machine speed against adaptive adversaries modelled on live conflict intelligence, letting counter-drone and other AI-enabled weapons rehearse scenarios at a fidelity and scale live firing ranges cannot reach. The company is headquartered in London with a second office in Berlin, and positions itself as sovereign European training infrastructure for defence AI.