Valarian

Investor: New Enterprise Associates (NEA)

London-based sovereign AI infrastructure provider Valarian has successfully secured a $50 million (£37.4 million) Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley venture capital giant New Enterprise Associates (NEA), bringing its total institutional funding to $70 million. Summary of transaction details: Value: $50 million (£37.4 million) Series A. Sector: DeepTech & AI / DefenceTech / Cloud Security Infrastructure. Advisor / Regulatory Impact: Welcomed publicly by UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan and Defence Procurement Minister Luke Pollard. This transaction marks NEA’s first-ever defence and dual-use investment in Europe. Key Entities: Target: Valarian (Valarian Software Ltd); Lead Investor: New Enterprise Associates (NEA); Participating Investors: Lightbank, XTX Ventures, Litquidity Ventures, Sequel; Angel Backers: Nikesh Arora (CEO of Palo Alto Networks) and Gokul Rajaram; Key Founders: Max Buchan (CEO), Josh McLaughlin (CTO). Location: London, UK (HQ). Note: Founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin, Valarian operates as a dual-use secure infrastructure company designed to address a critical structural vulnerability: the complete lack of a secure, sovereign governance layer between high-consequence enterprise operations and the third-party AI models they deploy. Rather than attempting to build capital-intensive frontier models that quickly commoditize, Valarian builds ACRA, a core control layer that sits on top of standard container orchestration tools like Kubernetes. ACRA wraps every individual workload, agent, or model inside a cryptographically unique, zero-trust enclave protected by a localized policy stack (integrating SPIFFE/SPIRE workload identities, default-deny network isolation via Cilium/Istio, and Kyverno policy gateways). This architecture allows sovereign governments, militaries, and highly regulated entities in healthcare and finance to run powerful open-weight AI models against ultra-sensitive private data on any cloud substrate (AWS, Azure, GCP, or private air-gapped on-premise rigs) without exposing intellectual property, encryption keys, or training metrics to external providers. Valarian has recorded massive commercial momentum, signing $43 million in contracts during its first quarter of operations alone and projecting approximately $100 million in contract value by the end of 2026. The $50m Series A injection will be deployed to scale their London engineering workforce, build out executive hiring, and accelerate their dual-track commercial distribution across Valarian Enterprise and Valarian Defence.

Investor: New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Nikesh Arora, Gokul Rajaram, XTX Markets, LitVC, Sequel, Lightbank

Investor: Scout Ventures, Molten Ventures, Gokul Rajaram, IQ Capital, Artis Ventures, MD One Ventures