Valarian announced that it raised $50 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing the company’s total funding raised to $70 million.
The round marks NEA’s first defence and dual-use investment in Europe. Lightbank, XTX Markets, Sequel, LitVC, and angel investors Gokul Rajaram and Nikesh Arora also participated.
Valarian is building a sovereign infrastructure layer for high-consequence operations and AI-driven systems. The company’s platform is designed to help enterprises, governments, and defence organizations retain control over how critical applications, AI systems, and operational workloads communicate, access data, and operate.
The funding will be used to accelerate delivery of infrastructure sovereignty across enterprise and government environments. Valarian said demand is increasing as critical systems and AI infrastructure become concentrated among a small number of providers, extending from cloud compute into the intelligence layer itself.
At a technical level, Valarian provides workload-level governance across the environments where critical applications and AI systems run. Governance is enforced at the infrastructure layer and inherited automatically by every deployed capability, enabling organizations to maintain operational control without relying on fragmented controls added later.
The company is pursuing two deployment tracks. Valarian Enterprise serves organizations deploying AI and other high-consequence workloads that require workload-level governance, compartmentalization, and operational control.
Valarian Defence serves sovereign nations and defence programs operating mission-critical workloads where control is non-negotiable. The company said this architecture is increasingly important as AI becomes operationally critical across both commercial and national security environments.
The investment comes as European defence spending reached €392 billion in 2025 and NATO allies accelerate spending on AI-enabled capabilities. Valarian said the key question for governments and institutions is not only whether they adopt AI, but whether they retain control over the infrastructure that intelligence depends on.
NEA said its investment reflects a belief that sovereign infrastructure is becoming a foundational layer for the AI era. The firm has more than $35 billion in assets under management and has backed technology and healthcare companies across multiple stages since 1977.
Valarian is headquartered in London and was founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin. The company is positioning itself at the intersection of national security, enterprise AI governance, and modern infrastructure control.
KEY QUOTES:
“The intelligence layer of Western institutions is consolidating: quietly, contract by contract, department by department, into systems those institutions do not control. We built Valarian because sovereignty isn’t a feature you can add later. It’s architecture you have to build from the ground up. This round gives us the capital to take that architecture to the organisations that need it most, at the moment they need it most.”
Max Buchan, CEO and Co-Founder of Valarian
“The critical question of the AI era isn’t which model wins — it’s who controls the environment intelligence operates inside. Valarian answers that question with genuine defence-grade architecture. This is NEA’s first defence and dual-use investment in Europe, and we made it because Valarian is building the control infrastructure layer the sovereign AI era requires.”
Mustafa Neemuchwala, Partner at NEA
“Today, AI is the defining currency of both hard and soft power. To shape our own destiny, in accordance with our values, it is imperative that we build Britain’s sovereign AI capabilities. Pioneering British firms like Valarian understand the challenge that’s in front of us and are building the solutions that will help us deliver a safer and stronger Britain. Investments like these are helping to keep the UK at the frontier of AI development, and complement the work we’re doing through our Sovereign AI Fund, AI Hardware Plan and more to build Britain’s AI strengths.”
Kanishka Narayan, UK Minister for AI and Online Safety
