On this week’s episode of the Sifted Podcast, we talk about what's next for Europe's defence tech sector. Funding to the sector is up from $114m in 2016 to $1.5bn so far this year — with projections it’ll hit $2.3bn by the end of the year — making it Europe’s fastest-growing sector.
But a whole lot of that capital is heading to just one kind of technology — drones — leaving plenty of other opportunities for investment, as governments put large sums of cash behind plans to rearm in the face of increasing Russian aggression.
Senior reporter Anne Sraders, who's been kept busy covering defence tech this year, joins editor Amy Lewin to discuss why the VC herd is flocking around drone startups, which new technologies will be assisting Europe’s militaries in the coming years, the companies trying to future proof European supply chains and just how likely it is that significant public money will flow into innovative startups, rather than big primes.
They also cover what happened at Resilience, the conference full of startups, soldiers and spies which took place in London this week.
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