Investing Where It Matters: What It Takes to Win in European Cyber-Defence

Demand for resilience is accelerating.

Europe’s cybersecurity and defence markets are at an inflection point. The demand for resilience is accelerating, driven by regulatory pressure, AI-driven threat evolution, and an urgent need to protect both digital and physical infrastructure. Yet opportunity alone does not guarantee success. At Telum, we invest where technology secures sovereignty, and where disciplined execution turns innovation into defence capability.

What we look for.

Defensible technology, not just novel code.

The cyber-defence market rewards technologies that create asymmetric advantage; faster detection, stronger protection, and credible deterrence. We look for deep-tech foundations: agentic AI, adaptive automation, and high-performance computing applied to real security challenges. Innovation must be measurable, reproducible, and technically hard to copy.


  1. Clear use cases and customer proximity.
    Winning teams understand their buyer. Whether targeting defence, energy, manufacturing, or public infrastructure, the best founders start with deep empathy for the operational environment. We prioritise ventures that are embedded in their customer’s world, where product design begins with the problem, not the pitch deck.


  2. Integration over disruption.
    Many cybersecurity environments are built on decades of legacy systems. Success comes not from replacing them but from augmenting them. We invest in solutions that can slot into existing architectures, enhance situational awareness, and strengthen resilience without overhauling everything that came before.


  3. Commercial discipline from day one.
    Technical brilliance is not enough. We back founders who pair engineering depth with commercial realism — teams that can articulate a path to revenue, prove value in pilot deployments, and translate proof of concept into repeatable scale.


  4. Operational grit.
    Cyber-defence is not a fast-fashion industry. The winners build enduring businesses with the patience to navigate procurement cycles, certification hurdles, and geopolitical complexity. Execution, not hype, defines long-term value.

What makes companies win in this space.

Across our experience, a few patterns repeat. The companies that break through tend to share three success factors:

Focus
They target specific segments and dominate them before expanding. In cyber-defence, precision beats breadth every time.

Credibility
They are led by teams with both technical and operational authority - people who have been inside the SOC, on the factory floor, or at the command centre.

Adaptability
They build modular platforms that evolve with the threat landscape, not brittle point solutions that age fast.

Where Telum fits in.

We are more than capital. We are operators who have scaled global technology businesses and led security organisations from the inside. We invest early, engage deeply, and help founders move from concept to contract, from pilot to production.

Europe's sovereignty depends on its ability to protect critical infrastructure and build the companies that make resilience possible.

Those are the companies we back.