By Sean Bielat, Founder & Managing Partner, Oscar Mike Venture Partners
Over the past several months, I invested in learning directly from Europe’s defense, technology, and investment ecosystems. My travels between Madrid, London, Lviv, Tallinn, Warsaw, Helsinki, Munich, Lisbon, Sardinia, and Washington, DC, reflected a core belief we hold at Oscar Mike Venture Partners: defense investing has to be informed by operators, with deep local knowledge, and grounded in real procurement and battlefield realities.
Across these markets, I kept seeing the same signals repeat. They helped clarify where European defense innovation is truly advancing and where capital allocation remains misaligned.
Ukraine offered the sharpest contrast. Innovation there is not aspirational; it is existential. Technologies are tested, rejected, refined, and redeployed under live conditions at a pace that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. For startups, Ukraine has become a proving ground where systems can be fielded quickly and, if effective, formally validated by the military. There is little room for theory. Performance is the only metric that matters.
In the United Kingdom, I encountered a country in the middle of a strategic transition. The UK is no longer fully aligned with either continental Europe or the United States and is reassessing the scale and structure of the military power it can realistically sustain. Capital intensive legacy force designs are giving way to focus on enduring strengths in intelligence, special operations, and global access shaped by history. Those strengths point toward asymmetric contributions, including unmanned maritime systems and intelligence-driven platforms, within broader European security frameworks. What stood out to me was not decline, but recalibration through comparative advantage.
Estonia shows what alignment looks like when political will, digital infrastructure, and national security priorities converge. Despite its size, the country has made meaningful defense commitments while positioning itself as one of Europe’s most efficient environments for building technology companies. Highly digitized government systems, streamlined business formation, and explicit defense priorities compress innovation timelines. When security is non-negotiable, execution accelerates.
In conversations with U.S. defense leaders and procurement reform advocates, I encountered signs of real movement alongside familiar warning signs. Recent Department of Defense acquisition reform announcements point to renewed intent, and efforts such as the Army’s Futures and Concepts Command suggest a push toward modernization. Still, experience argues for restraint. Reform is frequently promised and rarely sustained. More fundamentally, I continue to see a mismatch between venture capital models and niche defense hardware: valuations often outpace realistic opportunity, and a bubble has taken shape. Platforms dependent on a single procurement outcome remain difficult to support within traditional venture structures. (More to come on this in a future post.)
In Munich and across the broader DACH region, defense capital is present but deliberate. Investment velocity lags NATO’s eastern flank, and innovation remains centered on incumbents. Large defense primes are increasingly acquisitive, recognizing that external innovation can often be integrated faster than it can be built internally. This dynamic informs how we think about exits, favoring disciplined, contract-driven companies positioned for strategic acquisition.
Warsaw highlighted a different imbalance. Poland has NATO’s fastest-growing defense budget and clear procurement demand, yet lacks a mature venture ecosystem. Talent and operational need are evident, but capital infrastructure remains underdeveloped. For investors willing to engage early and locally, the opportunity is meaningful.
Helsinki’s Slush conference offered a final cultural insight. Europe’s technical talent rivals that of the United States, but ambition often takes a different form. Many founders aim to build durable companies rather than category-defining leaders. Closing that ambition gap remains an important challenge.
Taken together, these travels reinforced our thesis at OMVP. Europe’s defense renewal is real, uneven, and deeply contextual. The investors who succeed will be those who engage early, act decisively, and focus on systems that perform reliably when they are needed most.
Curious to hear more of my reflections from OMVP’s experiences this year? Get in touch.