Defence and dual-use: a conviction, not a vertical

It is the question we get most often since we widened our thesis beyond cybersecurity: why do defence and dual-use not appear among our fields?

Why the subject matters

The border between civil security and national security is fading. The same software supply chains, the same critical infrastructure operators, the same cloud providers sit on both sides of it. Europe funds, states order, and the Hauts-de-France region hosts an industrial base already part of that effort.

We follow this closely, because it moves the line of what an ordinary company has to prove about its own security.

Why it is not a field for us

Our fields do not describe what interests us, they describe where we know how to apply our filter. Run defence through the three questions.

Does the problem exist: beyond debate. Who pays for it: a public buyer, with cycles counted in years, clearances and accreditations, and a need for patient capital that a pre-seed ticket does not cover. What has already failed: we cannot answer. We have neither sold into nor operated inside that procurement circuit, and nobody in our immediate professional circle can steer us away from the expensive mistakes.

Two answers out of three are missing. We will not pretend otherwise in order to widen a scope.

What we do anyway

We look at companies whose first customer is civilian and whose sovereign use comes later: sovereignty of hosting, traceability of the software supply chain, operational resilience. There, the buyer is familiar to us, the cycle is short, and what we bring is real.

The rest we follow as readers and as citizens, not as investors. Announcing a vertical you cannot judge is the surest way to make a founder pay for it.

Building at that border? Let’s talk anyway: we will say plainly what we can bring, and what we cannot.