Our Investment in Valarian: Sovereign Infrastructure For The Free World

Over the past few years, the world has seen a rise in geopolitical conflict with War in Ukraine and the Middle East, along with US-European tariff escalation. As a result, European nations have a renewed focus on sovereignty after decades of globalization.

Beyond physical supply chain sovereignty, European governments and the most critical businesses are forced to confront the reality that their digital operations (for example, communication and defense data) runs on infrastructure they don't control. Because of the US CLOUD Act, the US government may compel data held by a US company, say AWS or Palantir, to be shared even if the data is held outside the US, which creates an existential data issue for defense and other regulated industries. 

This problem is further accelerating with the boom in generative AI and autonomous systems. Data is critical to make AI deployments successful, so sovereign AI requires a sovereign and secure data stack.

Today we're excited to announce that NEA is leading Valarian's $50 million Series A, our first defense and dual-use investment in Europe. Based in London, Valarian is building the sovereign infrastructure layer that lets governments, defense primes, and regulated enterprises make use of their data to run their most sensitive workloads including for critical communications, generative AI, or data analysis.

Valarian’s solution

Valarian's platform, ACRA, is a controlled deployment that sits between any type of compute (any cloud provider, on-prem, edge) and enables their customers to run any workload (communication, AI, etc) while keeping data federated and compute secure. 

The core building block is the enclave: an isolated environment with its own policy boundary, key management, and data layer. Enclaves let customers federate data in any way (by classification level, by department, by nationality, even by attorney-client privilege), while keeping full authority over keys, policy, and data movement. 

ACRA integrates with as much or as little of a customer's existing infrastructure as they choose. Customers can keep their existing cloud relationships, while ACRA governs what data leaves and who touches it. And customers can keep their legacy, often on-prem, data stack. ACRA enables them to run any modern application on this legacy stack, including cloud productivity/collaboration tools and the new wave of AI workloads that governments and regulated industries have been unable to adopt safely until now.

The opportunity

Valarian has the opportunity to become a Palantir-sized company by winning outside the US where Palantir has struggled due to sovereignty concerns. 

Palantir’s 9 figure deals with the UK NHS and MoD are under threat, and Palantir has become an important political issue in the UK.¹ In France, Palantir’s only major federal deal is with DGSI, which started in 2015 where they first adopted Palantir at the DGSI as a temporary solution, yet no suitable alternative has been available despite 10+ years of looking.² Palantir has had a tough time breaking into other EU countries like Germany and Switzerland, the former having no federal contracts and Palantir having lost deal opportunities with 9 agencies with the latter.^3,4

Valarian's opportunity and product vision is to fill this gap, which remains unsolved against other attempts to build digital sovereignty. Rather than building another sovereign cloud or another sovereign model lab, ACRA is the data governance and application deployment layer that makes all of those usable in high-trust environments. As a result, we believe Valarian is well positioned to be in the flow of AI token spend as government and regulated businesses adopt AI.

The Series A will fund Valarian's expansion across the stack, expanding from a controlled deployment layer with a few first-party applications into an end-to-end data platform, ontology, and their own suite of AI applications.

The team

Valarian is led by co-founder and CEO, Max Buchan. At age 21, Max joined a startup digital asset manager, CoinShares, as the first employee. There, he helped launch the first publicly listed bitcoin ETP and grew from 0 to $2B AUM in 18 months, after which CoinShares itself went public for $1B+. At CoinShares, he saw the challenges around federating data by sovereignty, which inspired him to start Valarian. 

Co-founder and COO, Josh McLaughlin, is a 12 year Palantir and 18 year US Special Forces veteran, who led many of Palantir’s key international accounts and sold over $1B of Palantir contracts during his tenure. Nick Trim, the co-founder/CRO of Darktrace ($5.3B UK-cybersecurity exit to Thoma Bravo) has also joined the team as the chairman of the board, and the engineering organization draws deeply on Darktrace alumni. 

This is a team that has sold to the hardest customers in the world and has the playbook to execute.

What's next

The team is growing across engineering, deployment, and go-to-market as they build out new products and markets across the UK, EU, and the Middle East. If you'd like to join, check out open roles here!

We're proud to partner with Max, Josh, and the entire Valarian team as they build the sovereign infrastructure layer for the free world.