A venture firm most people have never heard of just closed one of Europe's largest defense-tech funds this year, and BAE Systems put real money behind it.
You wouldn't guess that Warsaw is where some of the sharpest defense-tech dealmaking in Europe is happening right now, but that's exactly where Expeditions is based. The firm has raised 197 million euros, about 225 million dollars, for its second fund, according to Bloomberg. That closes a raise that started quietly and grew fast. Expeditions announced it had crossed 100 million euros back in September 2025, with a stated target of 150 million. It blew past that number.
Here's the part that makes this more than another VC press release. BAE Systems, the UK's largest defense contractor, committed 25 million euros into Expeditions as part of a 50 million euro program called Launchpad, splitting the money evenly with the Swiss firm Lakestar, according to Sifted. Lakestar is run by Klaus Hommels, the investor who backed Spotify and Revolut early. He's now betting on European defense the same way he once bet on consumer tech, and Lakestar is separately raising its own fund targeting 300 million dollars for the sector.
That's a defense prime acting like a venture capitalist. BAE isn't writing this check because it needs the return. It's writing it because it wants a seat at the table before these startups get expensive, and because a prime with deep pockets can absorb the failure rate that comes with betting on unproven dual-use technology. This is what corporate venture capital looks like when it's dressed up as strategy. BAE gets early visibility into companies working on autonomy, quantum sensing, secure communications - the kind of capability gaps that take years to close through traditional procurement.
Expeditions isn't new to this. Mikolaj Firlej co-founded the firm in 2021, years before defense tech became a fashionable line item on a VC's homepage. Its existing portfolio includes Alpine Eagle, Blackwall, Comand AI, and Nu Quantum, spread across cybersecurity, intelligence, autonomy and space. Fund II has already backed seven companies, among them Lendurai, Orasio and Q.
BAE and Lakestar aren't the only names on the cap table. The NATO Innovation Fund and the Polish Development Fund are both listed as backers, giving the fund a sovereign-capital flavor that pure private VCs don't have. There's also a less obvious group of limited partners: early executives from Skype, Wise, Bolt and Snowflake. That's not a coincidence. Those are people who made money building fast-scaling European tech companies and are now redirecting some of it toward founders working on drones, signals intelligence, secure networks - not consumer apps.
With the new capital, Expeditions plans to back as many as 40 early-stage startups. That's an aggressive number for a fund this size, and it tells you the firm expects to write smaller checks across a wider net rather than concentrating on a handful of bets. The strategy makes sense given the moment. Rising security spending across NATO members and the commitments made at recent alliance summits have created genuine demand for the kind of dual-use technology that used to sit for a decade in a defense contractor's R&D lab before anyone spun it into a company.
What's changed is who's willing to fund that gap. A defense prime backing a venture fund instead of building everything in-house is a governance choice, not just a financial one. BAE gets access without the overhead of running its own accelerator from scratch, and Expeditions gets a partner that understands procurement cycles most first-time VCs would find baffling. For founders building anything adjacent to defense in Europe right now, that combination, sovereign capital, prime-backed strategic money and experienced tech operators as angels, is a very different funding environment than existed even two years ago.
The bigger test comes later. Forty startups is a lot of shots on goal, and not all of them will clear the jump from prototype to fielded technology. Whether Expeditions' bet on volume pays off will say a lot about whether Europe's defense-tech boom is built on real capability gaps or just capital chasing a hot sector.
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