After nearly 15 years, David Dana, the head of VC investments at Europe’s largest LP, the European Investment Fund (EIF), is joining aerospace and defence VC Expansion Ventures as a general partner.
The move comes as the EIF has been getting more into defence tech in the last year as more VCs are looking to invest in European resilience and dual use startups.
Dana will now be making direct investments into startups — and helping with the firm’s fundraising efforts. Expansion Ventures, which has offices in Paris and Stockholm, has raised €137m for its first fund. It’s targeting €200m, which it hopes to close by the end of 2025. The EIF invested in Expansion Ventures about a year ago.
Expansion Ventures
Expansion Ventures invests from pre-seed to Series B, backing startups in the sustainable aerospace, air mobility and defence and dual use sectors. Its portfolio includes French small rocket launcher Latitude and Finnish satellite startup ReOrbit; it also exited a stake in buzzy Franco-German spacetech The Exploration Company.
Expansion was previously managed by French investment firm Audacia, but became independent as of last autumn, Dana says. Expansion’s other general partners are Charles Beigbeder, founder and chairman of Audacia; Sandra Budimir, cofounder of spacetech accelerator and consultancy Starburst; and Ted Elvhage, a longtime VC in the Nordics.
It’s keen to invest in companies working on things like decarbonising aviation, securing more sustainable resources for batteries, dual use and defence and rocket launchers, says Dana — focusing mainly on the EU.
He believes spacetech is “extremely promising” in 2025; while European space agencies and programmes have been backing companies for a while, “now we are at the phase where there are a lot of opportunities which need institutional, private investors to continue the path to growth and hopefully global expansion,” he argues.
Defence and resilience is becoming an even bigger topic now that President Trump is back in the White House. “It is definitely part of the discussion, and it will continue to be for quite some time,” Dana says. “It just reinforces the fact that Europe needs to be strong in this specific sector. We need to mobilise resources.”
At the EIF, Dana led efforts to invest in more defence and dual use VC funds — part of a €175m pool of money at the EIF earmarked for such investments. He says the EIF is now “in the middle of a number of processes,” and that “there might be some announcements in the coming weeks” — but no more than 10 funds.
‘Ongoing changes’ at the EIF
In early 2023, the EIF got a new CEO, Marjut Falkstedt, which sparked some changes at the EIF, Dana says.
“There’s still some ongoing changes, and it’s not yet finalised and stabilised. It’s always been a moving animal, in a way,” Dana said. An EIF spokesperson confirmed that “an EIF internal reorganisation took place.”
But that didn’t impact his decision to leave: “My thinking about potentially leaving… already started a couple of years ago. I preferred to wait for something that was really worth leaving for.”
“Like any kind of big institution, you have a number of constraints and processes which are there for a good reason, but which are sometimes a bit difficult to work with. But I wouldn’t be here now without EIF,” he says. “It’s a really nice place to work.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/eif-david-dana-joins-defence-vc/
