Valarian, which is the company behind ACRA, a platform for enforced isolation and compartmentalized infrastructure, emerged from stealth, with $7 million in strategic funding. This brings the company’s total seed funding to $20 million.
What the funding will be used for: With rising demand for control-first security postures, this latest funding will be used for the public launch of Valarian Defence, an offering built specifically for governments and institutions operating in high-risk, mission-critical environments.
The funding round was co-led by defence-focused Scout Ventures and Artis Ventures with participation from angel investor Gokul Rajaram. And previous investors have included Molten Ventures, IQ Capital, and MD One.
The company will also use the new capital to expand its government partnerships, develop additional deployment pathways, and bring platform-level containment to environments previously reliant on retrofitted security measures.
Company founders: Launched by operators with frontline experience, Valarian brings together expertise from military, finance, and systems domains. Max Buchan (a former international finance operator) and Josh McLaughlin (a former U.S. Army officer and Palantir executive) created Valarian’s ACRA platform based on their experiences in environments where trust routinely fails.
Following a few years of building and hardening ACRA to accommodate the needs of regulated enterprises, Valarian is now scaling its platform into national security and critical coordination environments where traditional security approaches have proven inadequate.
So far, the company has developed two main product lines: Privileged Communication and External Comms Capture for regulated enterprises. While Valarian Defence extends these capabilities to government-grade deployments requiring enforced compartmentalization and secure coordination infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our conviction in Valarian isn’t just about the technology — it’s about what it represents: a next generation of dual-purpose software. Seeing innovation like this coming out of the UK shows how geographically global this problem set is.”
Cody Huggins, partner at Scout Ventures
“We built ACRA because the environments we came from didn’t trust shared infrastructure — and now that skepticism is becoming standard. The more sophisticated the threat landscape becomes, the less room there is for improvisation in how institutions protect communications, data, and operational continuity.”
Max Buchan, Valarian’s Co-Founder and CEO
“Breaches don’t just leak sensitive data anymore — they disrupt discretion, decision-making, and the ability to respond. Valarian Defence is about helping governments and institutions retain control even when everything else is under stress.”
Josh McLaughlin, Co-Founder and COO of Valarian
