A Warsaw venture firm most people have never heard of just closed a 197 million euro defense-tech fund, and BAE Systems put real money behind it.
You wouldn't guess that Warsaw is where some of Europe's sharper defense-tech dealmaking is happening right now, but Expeditions is making a strong case for it. The firm has raised 197 million euros, about 225 million dollars, for its second fund, according to Bloomberg, after telling the Financial Times in September 2025 that it had crossed 100 million euros and was aiming for 150 million by the end of that year.
It blew past the target.
The important detail isn't only the size of the fund. It's who showed up. BAE Systems committed 25 million euros to Expeditions through Launchpad, a 50 million euro program it is splitting with Swiss venture firm Lakestar, according to Sifted. Lakestar is run by Klaus Hommels, the investor who backed Spotify and Revolut early, and it is separately raising a 300 million dollar fund for the sector.
That tells you where European defense tech has moved. A defense prime isn't writing this check because it needs a venture return to make the quarter look better. It wants to see companies working on everything from autonomy and quantum sensing to secure communications before those companies are already priced like public contractors. Frankly, that's a more honest use of corporate venture money than the usual innovation theater.
Expeditions wasn't built last week to chase a hot category. Mikolaj Firlej co-founded the firm in 2021, before defense tech became a standard line on European VC decks. Its portfolio includes Alpine Eagle, Blackwall, Comand AI and Nu Quantum, across cybersecurity, intelligence, autonomy and space. Fund II has already backed seven companies, including Lendurai, Orasio and Q.
BAE and Lakestar aren't the only names around the fund. The NATO Innovation Fund and the Polish Development Fund are both listed as backers, which gives Expeditions a kind of sovereign-capital backing that a purely private fund doesn't have. There is also a useful group of limited partners from earlier European tech wins: executives from Skype, Wise, Bolt and Snowflake. Those are people who made money building fast-scaling companies and are now putting some of it behind drones, signals intelligence and secure networks, not another consumer app with a slick onboarding screen.
You can see why that matters if you're a founder building anything close to defense in Europe. For years, the hard part wasn't only technology. It was finding investors willing to sit through slow procurement, export controls, government sales cycles and the awkward politics of selling to militaries. A normal software investor can say they like deep tech. Then the first procurement meeting arrives and everyone discovers how thin that conviction was.
Expeditions says the new fund could back as many as 40 early-stage startups. That is a lot for a 197 million euro vehicle, and it suggests the firm expects to write smaller checks across a wider field rather than making a few concentrated bets. The strategy fits the moment. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European governments have been forced to confront how much of their security posture still depends on slow-moving procurement systems and outside suppliers.
The Financial Times reported in 2025 that European defense-tech startups had attracted 2.4 billion euros since Russia's invasion, compared with just 30 million euros in 2020. That kind of increase brings real companies into the market, but it also brings tourists. You should assume some of the capital now chasing the sector will disappear the moment timelines stretch or a pilot program fails to turn into a contract.
BAE's presence gives Expeditions a useful edge there. It doesn't solve procurement, but it means the fund has a partner that understands why a good defense startup can look slow by ordinary venture standards. Expeditions gets strategic credibility. BAE gets access without having to build every capability inside its own walls. Founders get a different funding environment from the one that existed two years ago: sovereign money, strategic defense money - plus operators from Europe's older tech successes - all looking at the same market.
The harder test comes later. Forty startups is a wide net, and not all of them will make the jump from prototype to fielded technology. Europe's defense-tech boom will not be judged by how much capital gets announced in fund closes. It will be judged by whether the companies it backs can put working systems in the hands of customers who actually need them.
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