Who Funds Europe's Security? Pensions, Banks and Venture Capital - European Defence Week in Paris

Who funds Europe's security? The missing middle

European defence tech has never had more attention. Venture funding is at record levels and Poland leads NATO on defence spending. Yet Europe's largest capital pools remain mostly on the sidelines, and US investors lead many of the biggest rounds.

On 4 November, Kinga Stanislawska moderated a panel on this gap with Patrick Koimans of ABP and Mateusz Zawistowski of Defense24. Their diagnosis: the problem is not appetite. It is structure.

Pensions invest on risk and return. Koimans was clear that ABP does not treat defence as a mission. It invests on a risk and return basis, as its duty to participants requires. That means large tickets, proven managers and credible exits. Few European defence funds meet that bar today.

Defence value is built in platforms. Zawistowski argued that defence demand is a demand for capacity, delivered by systems of systems. Poland's SAN counter-drone shield is a live case: Kongsberg, state group PGZ and Polish company APS working as one platform. Investors need to understand how a company fits into such platforms, not just whether its product scales alone.

Dual-use is the on-ramp. Civil revenue funds early growth and reduces reliance on slow procurement. Robin Radar started by protecting airports from birds, moved into drone detection, and is now reportedly in a sale process at around EUR 2 billion. ABP held it indirectly through a small venture mandate.

The real gap is the middle layer. Europe lacks specialist growth managers with defence expertise. Without them, large allocators default to indexes. Long-dated funds of 10 to 12 years also outlast four-year political cycles, which makes managers a better channel for public money than grants.

A lesson from Poland in the 1990s. Zawistowski recalled how conservative US institutional money backed Poland's first local fund managers, then stepped back as they matured. Europe now needs the same for defence: financial platforms alongside industrial ones.

What is missing is specialist managers, mixed public and private vehicles, and a few clear success stories to benchmark against. The capital exists. The question is whether Europe builds the layer that connects it.