Valarian raises £37.3M to build a sovereign control layer for defence AI

Valarian, a London company building what it calls a sovereign infrastructure control layer, has raised $50M, or about £37.3M, in a Series A led by the US venture firm NEA. The company says the round takes its total funding to $70M, and NEA describes it as its first defence and dual-use investment in Europe. Lightbank, XTX Ventures, and a group of angels including Nikesh Arora and Gokul Rajaram also took part.

Stripped of the jargon, Valarian sells control. Its platform sits at the infrastructure layer and governs how critical applications, AI systems, and operational workloads talk to each other, reach data, and run, so that an organisation can prove and enforce who is allowed to do what. The company splits this into two tracks: an enterprise product for firms deploying AI in high-stakes settings, and a defence product for governments and military programmes where, as Valarian puts it, control is non-negotiable.

The round is a marker for a particular slice of UK AI. “Sovereign AI”, the idea that a country should be able to run critical AI systems on infrastructure it controls rather than depending on foreign clouds, has moved from talking point to investment thesis over the past year, helped along by the government’s own sovereign-AI push. A London company attracting a major US defence investor’s first European cheque, in a field where buyers care a great deal about where their data and models physically sit, is a sign the thesis is drawing real capital.

The harder question, as with any young infrastructure company selling to governments and defence programmes, is how quickly that translates into deployments. Procurement in this world is slow and demanding, and “control at the infrastructure layer” has to be proven in practice, not just promised. The funding buys Valarian time to make that case.