Spend any time on LinkedIn these days and you’re bound to come across VCs talking about one thing: ‘resilience’. European VCs are increasingly using it to describe everything from climate tech to space and new materials — and, most prominently, defence.
It’s become a much-mentioned investment topic — and London’s now home to a Resilience conference, tagline: “Startups. Security. Defence”.
For some, the term encompasses anything and everything to do with European technological sovereignty — ensuring that the continent can stand on its own two feet in the face of an uncertain relationship with the US and growing geopolitical unease. For others, it’s just a rebranding of a ‘tricky’ topic.
“European defence companies have ‘resilience factories’ instead of arsenals or munitions plants; it’s like Europeans are still too shy or pretentious to call these things what they actually are,” Michael Jackson, a Paris-based deeptech investor, tells Sifted. Resilience is “a softer, more neutered word than, say, security or defence, which is probably why it’s catching on in Europe.”
Nirwan Tajik, a growth investor at French firm Revaia, puts it bluntly: “It just feels a bit dishonest and not courageous. It’s braver to call a spade a spade.”
But not all investors are cynical about the new terminology. “If people in Europe can rally around the idea of resilience and use this as a description of European momentum” and “they want to call this resilience — if that’s a word that resonates with folks — I think that’s fine,” Lauren Lentz, general partner at early-stage VC Revent, tells Sifted.
What is ‘resilience’ tech?
The term’s prominence has risen alongside the boom in defence tech so far in 2025. As the US has grown far colder to Europe and the continent has rushed to up its own defence spending, defence tech startups have garnered far more attention and money.
Though ‘resilience’ is now being thrown around more liberally, it’s not necessarily a new trend: some VCs believe the term came about amid talk of “dynamism” in the US, like when Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz launched its “American dynamism” strategy in 2022. “Like most things, it took a bit longer to catch on in Europe,” says Jackson.
‘Resilience’ has been applied to a wide range of industries, from energy to even healthcare.
Some VCs are using it as an excuse to move their focus to the “hot” topic of the moment, and “to deploy more from less trendy fields (e.g. climate) into defence as well,” says one Munich-based VC, who requested not to be named.
As climate funding has been dropping in the last couple of years following a boom in 2021 and 2022, climate tech startups in particular are getting rebranded as ‘resilience’ tech.
It may also be something that could help VCs fundraise. Big LPs like the European Investment Fund recently approved €8.9bn of new financing for investments in security, defence and critical raw materials (although not weapons).
“It’s now become a catch-all phrase in Europe for firms looking to score some public LP money as it plays into the issues of sovereignty, whether legitimate or not,” Jackson argues.
The Munich-based VC suggests that defence still has a negative connotation, particularly in Germany, so the “‘cool urban VCs’ need to frame this investment approach to their staff, LPs, portfolio and public in a more sexy way.”
Andreas Fischer, founding partner of deeptech VC First Momentum, thinks founders and investors are following the money, as they have always done. “This is a huge opportunity in terms of the allocations that governments and also industrial companies are going to make in the next years; at the same time, as with any hyped topic, people will use this also to adjust their branding to what the right narrative right now is.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/resilience-new-vc-buzzword/
