Europe is talking loudly about rearmament and strategic autonomy. The harder question is whether private risk capital is showing up to match the rhetoric. One mapping of the venture landscape suggests the talk is still ahead of the money.
Europe, the argument now runs, must take responsibility for its own defence, and that cannot be done on public budgets alone. It requires private capital flowing into defence, security and resilience, and it requires investors to move past the reflexive exclusion of "sin stocks" that long kept weapons and lethal capability off the responsible-investment menu. Investment policies are changing. The question is whether they are changing far enough, and fast enough.
That question is easy to assert and hard to answer. So Catharina Candolin, a board member at the listed cybersecurity company SSH Communications Security and a strategy-and-preparedness specialist at OP Pohjola, set out to test one slice of it.
Across a series of LinkedIn posts she built, then crowdsourced, a working map: how many Europe-domiciled venture funds, broadly themed around defence, security and resilience, actually exist today, either deploying capital or out raising. Each round of comments and messages sharpened it. By her own framing it is a work in progress, not a final tally. Venture capital is only one instrument among several, and the picture is partial by design. But it is a concrete, countable proxy for how much dedicated risk capital the continent has assembled behind the theme.
Listeds has verified and enriched that list, and is now extending it. The origination is hers; the expansion is a shared effort, and it is still under way.
Her criteria were deliberately strict on structure and deliberately broad on theme. To qualify, a fund had to be Europe-domiciled (a European office attached to a US fund did not count); a genuine venture structure (corporate venture arms, investment companies and sovereign or state vehicles were excluded); and themed around defence in the wide sense, taking in cyber, energy, advanced materials, space and dual-use technology, while leaving out funds too generalist to count. Everything had to be publicly verifiable.
What the map shows
The verified list runs to 49 funds, and its shape is more revealing than its length. Most of the money is small: 19 funds sit below €50 million, the emerging and specialist micro-funds where much of Europe's early defence-tech conviction currently lives. Ten more occupy the €50–100 million middle. Only 20 funds clear €100 million, and within that band the genuinely large, dedicated pools are scarce: a handful above €300 million, led by DTCP's €500 million Project Liberty and Paladin's €342 million cyber fund, thinning out quickly below them.
For scale, S&P Global counted around 386 Europe-focused private equity and venture funds in 2024. A defence, security and resilience slice of 49, several of them still raising rather than deploying, is a modest share for a theme Europe now calls existential.
By status, the list splits roughly three to two: around 31 funds are actively investing, while 18 are still raising toward a target, which means a meaningful share of the headline capacity is announced ambition rather than committed capital. For an investor reading the field, that distinction matters: a target is not a cheque.
The through-line is the one Europe keeps circling back to. The continent is thin on risk capital, and defence is no exception. The scaled, dedicated venture pools that a serious rearmament of the private sector would imply are present, but few, and several of the largest are still being raised.
What that capital is chasing is real enough. European defence tech is building fast: Helsing's autonomous-systems software, Quantum Systems' reconnaissance drones, Frankenburg and Tytan on drone interceptors and Finland's own ICEYE in satellite imaging. The companies are raising, and 2025 was a record year, with European defence, security and resilience startups taking in around $8.7 billion.
But much of the biggest money still comes from outside Europe: in the period covered, US investors supplied around two-thirds of the capital raised by European defence-tech companies.
That is the gap this map measures: not whether the companies exist, but whether Europe has built enough dedicated funds of its own to back them.
A Nordic and Baltic reading, with care
The geography is suggestive rather than conclusive. On this snapshot Germany leads with eleven funds and the United Kingdom follows with seven, the rest spread across the continent.
Finland appears twice, and the pair tells a story in miniature: Cloudberry VC is actively deploying, while Sparkmind Capital's second fund is still raising. Its focus sits at the growth stage rather than the earliest startups. The Baltics punch above their economic weight (Lithuania fields four funds, Estonia two), a reminder that proximity to the threat tends to concentrate both attention and capital.
The honest caveat
This is the venture slice only. Defence and resilience companies also draw on growth equity, project and infrastructure finance, government co-investment and the primes' own balance sheets, none of which this exercise captures.
The list as it stands (49 Europe-domiciled VC funds across three size bands, with live investing-versus-raising status, and still growing) is below. If you want to see the live updated version, you can visit our insights page.
About the compiler.
Reading the European capital landscape for defence? Listeds brings the Nordic capital community together with the companies defining the defence, security and resilience sector at our defence investor event in Helsinki on 21 September 2026: an evening of company pitches and direct conversation for the people who allocate, research and steward capital across the region. Apply for a seat at the event.
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