BAE Systems has committed €50m (£43.2m) to two European defence tech venture capital funds, the second stage of its recently announced Launchpad programme. The money splits evenly: €25m (£21.6m) to Expeditions, a Warsaw-headquartered early-stage fund, and €25m to Lakestar, the European technology investor chaired by Klaus Hommels.
The investment puts a UK-headquartered defence prime on the cap tables of two funds whose stated job is to back founders outside the prime-contractor world. It also gives those founders a customer pipeline that runs through BAE’s existing defence, energy and advanced manufacturing businesses. The structure of the deal is what stands out.
The Cheques and Their Recipients
BAE Systems announced the commitment on June 16, 2026, in the BAE Systems release on the fund commitment. The strategy behind it was first sketched in February 2026.
Each fund receives €25m (£21.6m), and the two recipients sit in different places in the European defence tech stack. Expeditions is a specialist early-stage fund whose portfolio is built around security and dual-use companies. Lakestar is a generalist technology investor with a longer track record in consumer software, more recently refocused on European defence.
Dave Ewing, BAE Systems’ head of technology commercialisation, framed the rationale in the company’s release. “As a large defence company, we’ve always valued the capability and ingenuity that early-stage founders can bring to the table and these latest investments show that we’re serious about supporting them,” Ewing said. That seriousness is now expressed in two equal cheques to two external funds, the visible form of the new strategy.
- €25m / £21.6m to each of two VC funds
- 2 funds backed (Expeditions and Lakestar)
- February 2026 original Launchpad incubator unveiling
- 1 UK-headquartered defence prime on the cap tables
Meet Expeditions and Lakestar
Expeditions was launched in 2021 by Dr Mikolaj Firlej and Stanisław Kastory as “the leading early-stage investor in the future of European security.” Firlej, who completed a D.Phil at Oxford on autonomous weapons, is also a former security and policy adviser to the UK and Polish governments and a past member of a UN Group of Governmental Experts on the same subject, per the fund’s team and stated focus on the fund’s website. The partner roster includes former Royal Marines officers, a quantum deep-tech specialist, and a chartered financial analyst who spent more than a decade at PwC advising on deals.
Lakestar is a different animal. Founded and chaired by Klaus Hommels, the firm closed its latest fund generation in April 2024 at around $600 million, bringing assets under management to €2bn, per Lakestar’s April 2024 fund closing release. Its portfolio at the time of that release included Revolut, Isar Aerospace, sennder, and AccurX. Hommels’s June 2026 statement with the BAE deal frames the firm as backing “the next generation of defence-tech founders.”
| Expeditions | Lakestar | |
|---|---|---|
| Stated focus | Leading early-stage investor in the future of European security | Supporting the next generation of defence-tech founders |
| BAE cheque | €25m (£21.6m) | €25m (£21.6m) |
| Leadership | Dr Mikolaj Firlej, Stanisław Kastory (co-founders and General Partners) | Klaus Hommels (founder and chairman) |
| Founded | 2021 | Closed latest fund April 2024 at around $600m |
| Named portfolio | Early-stage European security and dual-use companies | Revolut, Isar Aerospace, sennder, AccurX |
How Launchpad Works
Launchpad is the wrapper. BAE Systems first unveiled it on February 6, 2026, in the February 2026 Launchpad programme unveiling, as a new technology incubator programme designed to take dual-use technologies beyond the defence sector and help cutting-edge innovations reach their full commercial potential. The €50m fund commitment is the second stage of that announcement, the part that turns a strategic statement into deployable capital.
The programme’s stated purpose is to address a problem the company itself names: moving defence technologies beyond prototype development. The mechanism is two-pronged, either funding early-stage ventures directly or spinning technologies out into independent startup businesses. BAE is doing both, and the two VC cheques sit in the first half of that pair.
“Building on our long-standing investment in innovation, we recently set up Launchpad as a win-win, aiming to spin out some of our own defence technologies to commercial markets while also backing startups who can bring something new to defence. This latest step means we’re full steam ahead on making that a reality.”
That was Dave Ewing, head of technology commercialisation at BAE Systems, in the company’s release. The release positions the spin-out and external-funding arms of the strategy as parallel activities, two halves of a single win-win.
A UK Prime Reaches for External Capital
The release also ties Launchpad to a wider policy frame. BAE says the programme aligns with priorities across Europe and the UK, and cites the UK Defence Industrial Strategy’s call for “constant innovation at wartime pace” and for more successful spinouts from UK-developed technologies. The investment reads in places as a corporate response to a government ask, and as part of a wider shift toward UK defence tech becoming a top investor pick.
That ask has been sharpened by the security environment of the past few years. The release does not name specific conflicts, but its language is unusually direct for a corporate announcement. Lakestar’s Hommels calls the moment “a pivotal moment in redefining [Europe’s] security and technological sovereignty.” Expeditions’ Firlej says “our security can no longer be assumed; it has to be built.” Both founders of the funds are framing the BAE cheque as part of a continent-wide effort.
“Europe is at a pivotal moment in redefining its security and technological sovereignty, and supporting the next generation of defence-tech founders will be critical to that effort. BAE Systems’ investment is significant as it brings together capital, deep sector expertise and access to markets to accelerate the development and deployment of the capabilities Europe needs to remain secure in an increasingly complex world.”
That was Klaus Hommels, founder and chairman of Lakestar. The “access to markets” line is the one that matters most for founders: it signals that the BAE cheque is, in effect, a route to a corporate customer base that most early-stage defence companies would struggle to reach on their own. The two fund managers sit between the prime and that customer base.
It also places the prime inside the day-to-day deal flow of two specialist funds, in a way that earlier corporate venture arms in defence rarely managed. Founders pitching into Expeditions or Lakestar will, by extension, be pitching into a relationship with BAE, with sovereign capability as the stated organising principle.
Beyond the Cheque
For the founders who will eventually receive money from Expeditions and Lakestar, the value of the BAE commitment is layered. The press release lines up a short list of what a portfolio company can expect from the relationship.
- Capital the €25m into each fund flows downstream into the funds’ own portfolio cheques
- Customer access the release names energy and advanced manufacturing as examples of the broader customer base startups will be able to tap through BAE
- Dual-use framing the programme is built around technologies with both defence and commercial applications, widening the customer base beyond military buyers
- Policy alignment the programme is explicitly tied to UK Defence Industrial Strategy language on “constant innovation at wartime pace” and on sovereign capability
That last item, the policy alignment, is doing real work. By tying the programme to UK Defence Industrial Strategy language, BAE is also positioning portfolio companies to sit inside the same “national priorities” frame the release cites. The two fund managers sit between the prime and the founders on both sides of that deal.
It is also, in effect, a buy-in for the founders. The BAE release says the programme is designed to use BAE Systems’ position as a technology innovator to support those same national priorities. The stated list includes rapid technology incubation, sovereign capability and economic growth. The fund’s investment committees will, in practice, be the gatekeepers to that relationship.
What BAE Has Not Yet Disclosed
The press release is unusually short on specifics that founders, limited partners and competitors will want. BAE has not named the size of the cheques beyond the €25m per fund split, has not disclosed whether the total commitment is a one-time deployment or the first tranche of a larger pool, and has not said when the capital is expected to be fully invested. The release frames the programme around wartime pace without naming a deployment schedule.
It has also not said how it will choose between the two funds when founders pitch overlapping theses, or whether the two fund managers will compete for the same deals. The release calls them partners; the market may read them as a duopoly, at least at the cheque size that matters for an early-stage European defence company. The first cheque out of either fund will be the data point.
