Sten Tamkivi’s Plural has been writing cheques into Europe’s best-funded defence tech, Helsing, along with a host of other big hitter VCs such as Accel, Lightspeed and General Catalyst. But now he’s got his eye on something a bit more boring.
“I haven’t found great companies yet, but there is a space I’m curious about, which is the super mundane stuff behind the scenes — like, what’s the modern [enterprise resource planning] for a military?” Tamkivi says.
“People have these quotes and sayings that ‘logistics win wars’,” he says, but when you actually “talk to the soldiers on the ground, there’s still spreadsheets and mobile phone calls to each other about, like, ‘Hey, where’s the food, where’s the water, where’s the diesel generator?’
“There’s probably slices of this industry that are still untouched by technology to a level that we don’t even imagine in the private sector,” says Tamkivi.
The Estonian investor, who’s one of the founding partners of London-based Plural, explains that while kinetic capabilities are used for only a small percentage of time during active war or training, there’s a question over what technologies will be used for defending countries the rest of the time.
“I believe this is a huge unsolved issue,” he tells Sifted, adding that in Estonia, people talk about “total defence”, a concept where both civilian and military resources work together to proactively defend the country. “What’s the actual tech stack for total defence for the entire population to participate?” he asks. “That’s an example of a war-adjacent capability that is interesting, and we are occasionally seeing teams in space-related defence topics; in rockets and ballistic technologies; in monitoring — covering large areas, detecting threats.”
One company Tamkivi has come across working on this issue is C4Shield, a small Estonian startup that doesn’t have a website yet. The company is developing a platform that automates situational awareness, threat detection and decision-making processes for targets, as well as helping coordinate things before and after striking targets (think: planning, compliance, risk management and legal issues).
Solving for ‘bureaucratic mess’
Tamkivi talks about the “bureaucratic mess” that happens around defence events, such as defending a power plant from a drone attack. While there are loads of startups focusing on how to detect and shoot down enemy drones, there aren’t many that cover what happens before and after an attack.
“What is the actual planning, and where do you shoot it down so it doesn’t fall on civilians’ heads, and what happens after? Who do you need to write reports to, and what are the legal implications if you shoot things down in a power plant?”
Tamkivi is thinking about these mundane processes more these days. “When I talk to soldiers and military commanders, bleeding-edge hardware is only part of what their tech stack needs,” he says. “There’s a lot of issues that are, on the face of it, much simpler for tech to solve: logistics, procurement, coordination, supply chains, manufacturing and so on.”
He also points to Plural portfolio company Labrys — a UK startup providing corporate, government and military and humanitarian users with a workforce management platform to verify, support and pay teams around the world — as one example. “The issue of secure communications and payments is seriously needed, and more straightforward to develop and deploy than a whole new fleet of hardware.
“Being a great defence tech that’s enhancing European sovereignty does not only mean you have to make weapons.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/plural-mundane-defence-startups-helsing/
