Max Buchan started advocating for infrastructure sovereignty when, as he puts it, “globalization and Davos were still cool.”
He felt that Western governments were quietly handing the keys to their most sensitive operations to American tech giants—and would eventually lose the ability to control what their own intelligence and infrastructure ran on. Most enterprises, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had three cloud servers—U.S., Europe, Asia—and nobody called it a vulnerability. Buchan, 24 at the time and fresh off helping take a fintech company from zero to a unicorn (which later listed on the Nasdaq at $1.2 billion), thought it was going to be catastrophic.
Buchan and co-founder Josh McLaughlin now lead Valarian, a London-based startup that builds the software layer governments and enterprises deploy underneath their AI systems to ensure it controls how that intelligence operates, what data can be accessed, and who can shut it off. McLaughlin comes to Valarian after a career as a managing director at Palantir.
Valarian has raised a $50 million Series A led by NEA, Fortune learned exclusively. The round brings total funding to $70 million and marks NEA’s first defense and dual-use investment in Europe.
