BAE Systems, the UK’s largest defence company, is putting €50m into venture capital, a bet that the startups it backs today could shape the weapons it sells tomorrow.
The money will flow into VC funds focused on European defence-tech, with €25m of it going into two funds run by Klaus Hommels’ Lakestar and the Polish firm Expeditions. It is the second phase of BAE’s ‘Launchpad’ programme.
An incumbent backing its disruptors
The logic cuts two ways, and BAE is unusually open about it. Launchpad is built both to spin BAE’s own lab technology out into commercial startups, and to back outside founders ‘who can bring something new to defence’, as commercialisation chief Dave Ewing put it.
So a prime contractor is funding the small, fast companies that, in another telling, exist to disrupt primes like BAE. It is a hedge as much as a gift: better to own a slice of the insurgents than be blindsided by them. The sweetener for startups is real, though, access to BAE’s customers across defence, energy and advanced manufacturing.
