The New Defense Post #9

Welcome back to the 9th edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we’ll cover:

What do you need to build a startup? It comes down to two foundational bricks: talent and capital. The talent is the founders; the capital comes from VCs and angels. These two elements are co-dependent, and their abundance—or lack thereof—can determine the success or failure of a startup ecosystem.

In defense tech, VC money has been notoriously scarce for years. The reasons were largely ethical, many VCs didn’t understand the space, and financial—it was a difficult industry in which to land contracts. But it turns out the most ethical thing you can do is fund people building technologies to defend their countries. And, as it happens, you can also build multi-billion-dollar companies in this space.

As always, it couldn’t be done until someone did it.

We sat down with Perry Boyle, one of the VCs who recognized the potential and the urgency of funding defense tech startups. He did so in the most active defense tech space in the world: Ukraine.

In January 2024, Perry co-founded MITS Capital to help Ukrainian startups secure the funding they need to scale—and to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia.
Before co-founding MITS Capital, he spent 30 years on Wall Street, leading global investment strategies and managing multi-billion-dollar portfolios at institutions such as SAC Capital and Point72.

Read the full interview on The New Defense Post

🗣 John Healey, UK Secretary of State for Defense:” Through Project Octopus, our Ukrainian friends will share the technology and intellectual property with the UK—in turn, we’ll develop this further and mass-produce it to supply thousands of interceptor drones back to Ukraine monthly” (Defense News)

📰 Our Take: The UK has been smart in conducting this initiative. In the short term, Ukrainian expertise will be vital in keeping our defenses strong. It would be great to see many more such initiatives across Europe.

An ideal future would involve overcoming national egoism in defense procurement and production — or at least doing so for defense tech startups.

🗣 Brandon Tseng, Co‑founder & President, Shield AI: “Airpower without runways is the holy grail of deterrence. It gives our forces persistence, reach, and survivability, and it buys diplomacy another day.” (Shield AI)

📰 Our Take: What makes this drone interesting is its ability to deliver fighter jet capabilities from virtually anywhere. What remains uncertain is how expensive it will be to maintain and how effective it will be under real-world conditions. The drone is relatively costly, with a price tag of $27 million—still cheaper than a manned aircraft, but far from being cheap. Production is ambitious, with plans for 150 units per year, which is high for a system of this complexity.

So far, neither side in Ukraine has deployed this class of advanced combat drones. Often, high-cost, advanced drones have underperformed once fielded, as countermeasures are evolving too quickly for them to remain effective long-term. Will the same happen to unmanned fighter jets?

🗣 Rick Smith, CEO & Founder, Axon: “The future of defense will be defined by how fast we can connect sensors, systems, and allies into one network that acts at machine speed.” (SECURITY Infowatch)

📰 Our Take: The future of counter-UAV interceptors appears to lie in blending multiple sensors to increase effectiveness. Slowly but steadily, we are seeing an increase in the complexity of these systems.

Simple optical navigation based on computer vision is no longer sufficient. Beyond visual range, interception becomes highly problematic—even before considering adverse weather conditions.

It’s also great to see EU startups stepping up their collaboration game to level up the overall ecosystem.

As of Feb 28, 2025, at least 24 Russian Black Sea Fleet vessels had been destroyed or damaged since Feb 2022. (UK defence journal)

Founded in the Netherlands in late 2023, DroneAid Collective has grown from one workshop into a Europe-wide network helping Ukraine with drone donations, advocacy, and fundraising. We sat down with German Stelmakh to talk growth, public perception, and how anyone can start a serious volunteer effort.

DroneAid is a European initiative built around the slogan “Make Europe build and Ukraine win.” We fundraise, build, and run workshops for anything related to drones in Europe to support Ukraine—meeting practical needs, advocating publicly, and mobilizing volunteers and donors.

We work on three fronts at once: volunteer action, diplomacy and outreach, and fundraising. Drones are among the most important tools for Ukraine today. New workshops are popping up like mushrooms after rain. Momentum is real.

Three steps mattered most for me:

Don’t overthink the long term on day one. Start small, run the first workshop, learn, and widen the circle.

The current “drone story” started with volunteer networks. Larger enterprises followed, but the early push—fundraising, experimenting, delivering at speed—came from volunteers and NGOs who were close to the frontline’s real needs.

Major Ukrainian charities—like the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation—now move significant volumes daily. That agility doesn’t begin with commercial incentives; it begins with urgent problems and people solving them directly.

NGOs tend to have the closest dialogue with personnel on the ground. That proximity—face-to-face, feedback loops—lets volunteers iterate quickly and plug gaps fast. It’s a different role than manufacturers, and both are needed.

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