On July 17, Lakestar closed its Resilience I Fund at €262.2 million. Lakestar calls it Europe’s largest dedicated defence and dual-use fund. It is backed by the NATO Innovation Fund and 201 Ventures, and Lakestar’s existing portfolio includes companies like Helsing and Isar Aerospace. We have no relationship with Lakestar. We cite the close for what it proves: growth capital for European dual-use technology now exists at real scale.

For years the standard complaint in this category was that Europe lacked money. That complaint is expiring. When a fund of this size is raised specifically for defence and dual-use, with NATO’s own investment vehicle among the backers, capital availability at the growth stage stops being the binding constraint. The constraint moves upstream. And upstream is where we work.

The pipeline problem

A growth fund cannot invest in a thesis. It invests in companies that have already survived their hardest technical questions. In dual-use, those questions are unforgiving. Does the material hold at operating temperature? Does the system perform outside the lab? Will a certifying body put its name behind the part? Companies that can answer yes are scarce, and they are scarce because that work happens years before a growth round, at pre-seed, when almost nobody is watching.

This is the gap we see in the Netherlands. The research base is strong, the founders are here, but the number of Dutch dual-use companies that will be technically de-risked and ready to absorb serious growth capital in three to five years is smaller than it should be. That pipeline does not fill itself. Someone has to fund and do the de-risking work now.

What de-risking looks like: Arceon

Arceon, from our portfolio, builds ceramic composites for hypersonics and space applications, rated to 2000°C, and has earned ESA certification for its materials. At pre-seed, de-risking meant putting samples through test campaigns that could have killed the company, and documenting every failure until the material’s behavior was predictable rather than promising. That is the difference between a material and a product.

ESA certification converts years of that work into something a program manager can design around and a growth investor can underwrite. This is what becoming investable at scale actually means. Not a bigger deck. A retired risk, confirmed by an institution whose signature carries weight.

Our view on the next five to ten years

We will leave commentary on fund sizes and capital markets to others. That is not our seat. Our seat is pre-seed, and from that seat the next decade for Dutch dual-use looks like a throughput question. More spinouts need to leave TU Delft, Twente, Eindhoven, TNO and NLR with clean IP and a first technical milestone already scoped. More first cheques need to be sized for test campaigns and certification work, not just for software burn rates. And more early investors need to sit inside the technical work with founders, because in this category the diligence that matters happens on the test bench, not in the data room.

If that happens, the Dutch pipeline will produce companies at the investable threshold every year, and the growth capital now being raised across Europe will have somewhere to go. If it does not, the money will flow past the Netherlands to ecosystems that did the early work.

What’s next

We are working on something that speaks directly to this pipeline question. More on that soon.