Gallos Raises $50M to Scale Its Defence Builder Studio

Gallos Technologies has raised $50m (£35m) in a balance-sheet round still open to a few strategic backers, co-led by Ventura Capital and Aberdeen Investments with founding investor Lansdowne Partners. The UK studio will use the money to fund its next cohort of defence, security and resilience startups and to deepen its own platform.

The raise lands as governments pour cash into battlefield and dual-use tech. What sets Gallos apart is the model itself: a hybrid that builds companies from inside rather than only writing cheques.

A Studio That Builds Before It Backs

Gallos calls itself a company builder not a traditional VC. Co-founded in 2021 by Josh Burch, a former senior UK national-security official who earlier worked at Goldman Sachs and built FTI Consulting’s EMEIA cyber practice, and Dean Jones, an armed-forces veteran and ex-Special Forces operator, the firm sits operators and company-builders in the same room.

Patient capital is the stated edge. Ideas get time and shared infrastructure instead of the usual 18-month runway pressure. The team includes former GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming as chairman of the strategic advisory board, former GCHQ CTO Gaven Smith, and former NSA CTO Greg Smithberger. Sir Anthony Finkelstein, once the UK’s chief scientific adviser for national security, has also lent his name to the platform.

• Identify capability gaps from nation-state experience
• Spin or co-found the company inside the studio
• Supply early customers from government and commercial networks
• Layer follow-on capital from the Gallos Ventures side

Burch put it plainly after the close: the platform combines frontline national-security experience with the ability to build and scale companies at pace. The new money unlocks the next StirlingX and AI Score while strengthening the operating platform.

Ventura and Aberdeen Bet on the Pedigree

Ventura Capital, an early Spotify backer, and Aberdeen Investments co-led. Lansdowne Partners, already on the cap table, returned. The round stays open for a small number of additional strategic investors.

Mo El Husseiny, managing partner at Ventura, said Gallos’s power is in its people. The team knows where the gaps lie and fills national defence and resilience whitespaces with purpose. He called it the go-to platform at a moment when public and private sectors both demand pace and quality.

Nalaka De Silva, head of private market solutions at Aberdeen Investments and portfolio manager of the abrdn Global Private Markets Fund, said the firm looks for platforms that address long-term structural challenges. Gallos combines operational credibility, technical expertise and the GALLOS Alliance network of senior security leaders, giving it a distinctive ability to spot resilience gaps and validate market need.

The world faces rapidly growing and evolving digital threats, fuelled by geopolitical instability and sharpened by the speed at which new and emerging technologies are being turned against us. Gallos’s work enhances our ability to protect both people and businesses, in the UK and other allied nations.

Sir Jeremy Fleming, chairman of the strategic advisory board and GCHQ director from 2017 to 2023, made that assessment public with the announcement.

The Network That Sees the Gaps First

Gallos leans on what it calls the GALLOS Effect: unique security insight for investment selection, nation-state-level due diligence, patient connected capital, and early visibility on talent and opportunities. The Alliance of CISOs at global firms supplies commercial pull. Former UK and US strategic cyber operators, DevOps leads and senior managers fill the technical bench.

That network is the sleeper asset. Pure financial sponsors can read PitchBook. Few can walk into a secure briefing, map an emerging threat vector, then stand up a company that already has a design partner inside a ministry or prime contractor. Dean Jones still runs portfolio company StirlingX as CEO while remaining managing partner, keeping the feedback loop tight.

Key platform claims in plain numbers

• $50m / £35m fresh balance-sheet capital, round still open
• 4+ named portfolio companies plus stealth robotics and cyber builds
• Decades of combined nation-state security and intelligence experience on the team
• Pre-seed to Series B focus across security, defence and resilience

Portfolio Proof Already on the Books

The studio’s track record is short but concrete. StirlingX, spun out for sovereign data intelligence and drones, sits at the centre. Fleming chairs it. Jones is CEO. AI Score emerged from the studio as an AI governance and management play. Alchem Technologies covers analytics and cybersecurity. Earlier, Gallos put $2m into Second Front Systems to accelerate its UK defence market push.

StirlingX has already moved further. It closed an earlier $11M seed for its AI drone tech and later a StirlingX $20M Series A with Fleming as chair. Those rounds sit inside the same flywheel the new $50m is meant to accelerate. The StirlingX May 2022 seed data analytics entry on the studio site is still listed as the first major build.

Where the Fresh Capital Goes Next

Management says the money funds the next cohort of companies and investment in the Gallos platform itself. That means more AI-accelerated development capacity, more shared services for portfolio teams, and more of the Alliance network time. Stealth builds already sit in robotics and cyber. Expect those to surface once customer validation is locked.

Burch framed the goal as creating the next StirlingX and AI Score. The studio model keeps ownership and insight concentrated: Gallos does not simply back a founder who later discovers government sales cycles run three years. It starts with the buyer problem and reverse-engineers the product.

European Defence Capital Is Moving Fast

The raise fits a wider shift. European defence, security and resilience startups raised $8.7 billion in 2025, up 55 percent year-on-year and four times the level of five years earlier, according to Dealroom figures cited in a Newfund Capital analysis. Defence now accounts for roughly 10 percent of all European VC funding, up from under 1 percent before 2020. Specialized funds have nearly doubled their participation share.

The same analysis notes the sovereignty gap: the United States still captures the bulk of NATO-aligned defence VC. European rounds frequently include non-European capital at later stages. Homegrown platforms with deep allied security ties therefore carry premium strategic value. Gallos is one of the few that can claim both the operational pedigree and a working studio process.

That context also explains the July mega-rounds that crowned European defence AI winners. Large cheques are flowing to pure-play AI and autonomy names. Gallos occupies a different lane: smaller, earlier, operator-led builds that can still plug into the same government budgets.

Who Gains From the Studio Layer

Portfolio founders get ready-made distribution into hard-to-reach buyers and a bench of people who have actually held clearances and run operations. Limited partners get exposure to dual-use companies that already carry built-in market validation. Governments and primes get technology that has been stress-tested against real threat models rather than slide decks.

The losers in this frame are traditional pure-play seed funds that lack the security network and the slow-moving corporate venture arms of legacy defence primes that struggle with speed. Gallos is small enough to move and connected enough to matter.

The round remains open. A handful of additional strategic investors can still join. For now the $50m is already earmarked for the next wave of companies that will try to turn classified insight into commercial product before the next crisis forces the issue.