Venture Geopolitics Issue 34
10 Feb 2026
The war in Ukraine, combined with weakening US support for NATO, has made defence autonomy an urgent priority for Europe. At the same time, satellites have become critical infrastructure, underpinning everything from communications and energy networks to transport and military operations.
Many countries are responding - Germany alone plans to spend €35B on military space capabilities by 2030 - recognising that sovereign access to orbit is becoming a security necessity.
States that cannot launch and replace their own satellites must rely on allies at moments when space systems support communications, intelligence and military operations. The UK is in this category, underscored by the recent Orbex announcement — one of Britain’s few launch prospects entering administration.
Britain has extraordinary engineering talent but repeatedly fails to turn this into durable industrial champions, leaving firms underfunded or sold abroad. The FT notes the UK now hosts around 1,900 space companies (seems like a lot!) BUT most are small and struggle to scale, while competitors treat launch and orbital infrastructure as strategic assets supported by defence budgets.
Without a commercial anchor like SpaceX in the US, Britain risks remaining a component supplier rather than a systems leader, weakening our ability to respond to growing threats and opportunities in orbit.
Two other signals this week reinforce the stakes: Elon Musk argued that “in 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space”, meanwhile reports show Russian satellites have manoeuvred near at least 17 European communications satellites since 2023, raising concerns about future interference.
Public/IPOs
Alphabet’s 2025 earnings: search revenue +17% YoY (pushing back on the idea that AI has already broken Google’s core cash engine!). Management guided $175–185B capex in 2026, 2x 2025, largely for data centres, chips & related infra. Reportedly preparing to raise ~$15B in US bonds & market debt in UK & Switzerland - i.e. plans now too large to fund solely from cash generation (here)
Amazon’s 2025 earnings: overshadowed by a $200B 2026 capex plan that triggered a sharp sell-off. Shares fell >10% & Amazon lost ~$220B in market value after outlining the spending level (~50% above 2025 & well ahead of expectations). AWS Q4 revenue rose 24% YoY to $35.6B & backlog reached $244B, but investors focused on how long it will take to earn returns on such a large build. Separately, Amazon disclosed its $8B Anthropic investment is now ~$60.6B on paper via preferred stock & convertible notes tied to later funding rounds (here)
Workday replaced CEO Carl Eschenbach with co-founder Aneel Bhusri, notably as investors worried about how AI changes enterprise software. Revenue growth has slowed to 12.6% in the first 9mo of its fiscal year from 16–17% previously, despite AI-related moves including the acquisition of Pipedream & other enterprise AI assets. Shares fell further on the announcement, suggesting investors saw leadership change as evidence of rising pressure (here)
Stripe reportedly discussing a tender offer valuing the company at $140B, as large private companies seek liquidity without committing to a near-term listing (here)
UK cloud infrastructure firm Nscale has hired banks (here)
Eikon Therapeutics priced a $381M IPO & Generate Biomedicines filed after selling $805M in preferred stock, reflecting continued investor interest in AI-enabled drug discovery / biotech (here & here)
Big Dogs
Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.6 & pushed hard on enterprise distribution as Cowork became a focal point in the software sell-off. Opus 4.6 is positioned as stronger on complex reasoning, long-running tasks & coding support, with a 1M-token context window & improved ability to work across large document sets used in law, finance & research. Anthropic is also reportedly preparing an employee tender offer that would allow staff to sell shares at a pre-money valuation of at least $350B, with reporting linking it to a funding round as large as $20B. It also ran amusing & well-received Super Bowl ads (see here) highlighting that Claude remains ad-free, aiming to differentiate on trust & business model clarity (here)
OpenAI is shifting further towards enterprise deployment & monetisation while scaling the services layer around ChatGPT. It launched Frontiers, a tool aimed at helping companies manage agent systems in production. It is also reportedly hiring hundreds of consultants - effectively sales engineers - to help enterprises implement ChatGPT use cases. OpenAI is testing ads for some US users on free or low-cost tiers while pursuing a very large fundraise (widely reported as around $100B) to support compute needs & reporting suggests internal resource allocation is increasingly centred on ChatGPT product growth (here)
Fundamental emerged from stealth at $1.2B after raising $255M to build large tabular models for the structured data most big companies actually run on. It is building Nexus, designed for very large enterprise datasets such as spreadsheets & databases with billions of rows, with the claim that it can analyse structured data more reliably than general-purpose LLMs for tasks like demand prediction, pricing & churn (here)
Regulation
The European Commission issued preliminary findings that TikTok may be breaching the Digital Services Act through design features such as infinite scroll & autoplay. If confirmed, TikTok could face fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover unless it makes significant changes to product design (here)
French prosecutors raided X’s Paris offices over AI-generated abuse content linked to Grok as scrutiny rises under the Digital Services Act. The case reflects a broader shift towards regulating how platforms handle harms linked to generative AI outputs, not just user posts (here)
Spain is signalling it may follow Australia in banning social media for under-16s. France, Denmark & the UK are considering similar moves (here)
Venture Capital
Europe’s venture market rose 5% to €66B in 2025, with funding concentrating in AI & defence. AI deals accounted for €23.5B & defence investment rose 55% YoY to $8.7B. ElevenLabs reached $11B after a $500M raise & Synthesia hit $4B, while the NATO Innovation Fund has €1B to deploy (here)
UKRI paused new grants as it restructures its £8B annual budget towards fewer priorities & more commercial outcomes. Full implementation is expected by April 2027. The Science & Technology Facilities Council has been instructed to find £162M in savings while maintaining international commitments. Innovate UK has reduced support for new SME “clients” & is shifting towards backing fewer companies with more support per company (here)
MASNA Ventures is raising at least $100M for a Saudi defence-focused venture fund & Spain based Kembara launched a €1B growth-stage deep tech fund with a first close at €750M (here and here)
Venture Geopolitics
Macron declared a European “geo-economic state of emergency” & called for joint borrowing and regulatory simplification to fund strategic sectors. He is urging eurobonds to fund AI, defence & green tech, plus “European preference” in critical supply chains & procurement. Resistance from Germany & Nordic states remains strong, but the direction is clear: industrial policy is being framed as sovereignty policy (here)
Trump let the New START arms control treaty expire, adding uncertainty just as Europe debates deterrence without guaranteed US backing. New START was the main US–Russia agreement limiting deployed strategic nuclear warheads & launchers, with inspection & verification mechanisms that reduced uncertainty about the other side’s forces. It capped deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each for the US & Russia & it sat within a broader post-Cold War trend that saw global warheads fall from roughly 70,400 in 1986 to about 12,500 today. The US is now pushing for a broader multilateral framework that would include China, but China’s arsenal is estimated around 600 & is expected to grow further this decade & Beijing has historically resisted limits while it expands. Near-term impact is fewer inspections, less shared data & more room for worst-case assumptions (here)
The US is planning chip tariff exemptions for large cloud providers, linked to how much manufacturing capacity TSMC builds in the US. The plan described in reporting would impose higher tariffs on semiconductor imports while allowing exemptions tied to domestic buildout. Under an outline referenced in coverage, Taiwanese firms building US fabs could import up to 2.5x the planned capacity tariff-free during construction (or 1.5x for already-built capacity), and TSMC could allocate those exemptions to major US customers. TSMC has pledged $165B in US capacity investment (here)
Palantir’s UK government contracts total at least £670M across defence, health & nuclear-related work, raising questions about dependency & oversight. The reported total includes £382M with the MoD, £244M+ with the NHS & £15M linked to the UK nuclear weapons agency, spanning at least 10 departments, with some contracts not listed on central procurement sites. For government, the core issue is that long-term reliance on a single vendor for sensitive systems can increase switching costs & reduce flexibility, especially when the vendor is headquartered abroad (here)
Russian “proximity” satellites have approached at least 17 European geostationary satellites since 2023, increasing concern about interception & future interference. GEO satellites orbit about 35,000km above Earth & underpin telecoms, navigation support & some government communications. Officials believe Russian satellites such as Luch-1 & Luch-2 have manoeuvred close enough to target unencrypted transmissions, including command links that control satellite positioning. Even if messages cannot be decrypted, monitoring can reveal usage patterns, ground terminal locations & operational routines (here)
Project Vault is a $12B US plan to create a strategic stockpile of critical minerals used in EVs, semiconductors, drones & advanced manufacturing. The proposal involves a $10B Export-Import Bank loan plus $1.67B of private capital, aiming to buy & hold inputs that have faced price volatility & export restrictions, particularly where China dominates processing. Reported participants include GM, Stellantis, Boeing & Google, and the policy sits alongside wider efforts including resource deals with Ukraine, Australia & Greenland plus support for domestic processing (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
OpenClaw’s rapid spread is creating a security & governance issue as employees run always-on agents with access to corporate data & external actions. Cisco’s AI threat team said 26% of 31,000 agent skills analysed had at least one vulnerability & researchers found more than 1,800 exposed instances leaking API keys, chat histories & credentials. Token Security reports 22% of employees at customer organisations are running OpenClaw on corporate machines (here)
Moltbook is facing scrutiny after MIT Technology Review reported much of the content was human-generated. Researchers also found human-directed posts, security issues & shallow engagement, even as usage reportedly surged from ~30,000 agents to >1.5M (here)
New research suggests AI tools can intensify workloads rather than reduce them, with employees taking on more work without being asked. UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business reviewed 8mo of use at an unnamed US tech company with ~200 employees & found people worked faster, for longer hours, across a broader scope of tasks while using generative tools. The results suggest employees felt more capable & therefore took on more responsibility, offering a “best case” explanation for why AI can raise output without immediately cutting headcount (here)
Notable deals:
Cerebras Systems raised $1B at $23B as specialist chipmakers attract large cheques despite the dominance of Nvidia. The round was led by Tiger Global, with Benchmark investing at least $225M, including via two dedicated vehicles reportedly created for the position. Cerebras was valued at $8.1B just 6 mo earlier, implying rapid repricing as buyers look for alternatives in training & inference hardware (here)
ElevenLabs raised $500M at $11B as AI voice becomes a major funded category. The round was led by Sequoia & more than tripled valuation, reinforcing that voice is viewed as a distribution layer for assistants, agents & consumer AI products (here)
Harvey raised $200M at $11B. The round was co-led by Sequoia & GIC - standing out amid the broader vertical software selloff as investors rotate toward categories where AI can deliver measurable gains in time saved & billable output. The bet is domain-specific workflows, especially in law, can be rapidly transformed by foundation models —creating both disruption risk for incumbents & outsized upside for platforms that become the interface layer (here)
Adaption Labs raised $50M seed to build smaller models designed to cut compute costs & support continuous learning. The pitch is that more adaptive models can be cheaper to run & update, which matters as enterprises look to deploy models in production without frontier-scale inference bills (here)
Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek is launching ai.com as a consumer platform for personal AI agents after paying $70M for the domain. The product is being introduced with a Super Bowl LX advert, signalling that consumer agent platforms are now spending at scale for distribution (here)
Energy
US states are starting to restrict data centre buildouts as grid constraints tighten. New York introduced a 3-year moratorium on some data centre permits after electricity demand reportedly tripled in a year, & several other states have introduced similar legislation (here)
Defence
Notable deal: Overland AI raised $100M for autonomous ground vehicles used in logistics & reconnaissance. The company has raised $42M previously, reflecting continued investor appetite for autonomy in defence-adjacent applications (here)
Cybersecurity
Italy repelled pro-Russian DDoS attacks targeting Milano-Cortina Olympics infrastructure as national cyber agencies report higher attack volumes & improving defence success rates. Italy’s ACN reported attacks rose 30% in H2 2025 YoY while successful breaches fell to 10% & plans to raise headcount towards ~600 (here)
Crypto/Stablecoins
Bitcoin fell to the $60’s as the “digital gold” narrative weakened alongside a broader tech sell-off. The move highlighted how correlated crypto can become during risk-off episodes (here)
Tether reportedly pulled back from plans to raise $20B after investor pushback (here)
xAI recruiting for a crypto finance role signals continued interest in integrating digital assets into AI-era consumer platforms (here)
Peter Thiel-backed Erebor received a US national banking charter & plans to operate with stablecoins at its core. Founded by Palmer Luckey & Joe Lonsdale, the bank plans to focus on start-ups & scale-ups that traditional banks often underserve (here)
Space
Orbex has announced plans to appoint administrators after failing to secure the funding it needed and failing to finalise merger talks with The Exploration Company. The episode highlights how hard it is to sustain a UK launch champion without anchor demand. Orbex has been one of the most prominent UK-based launch start-ups and has benefited from UK government support, but the reported sale discussions (& failures) suggest scale & capital requirements remain difficult for a standalone UK rocket firm (here)
With SpaceX now having acquired xAI, concerns have intensified that control over launch services could translate into control over future space-based computing infrastructure. Elon Musk has proposed orbital data centers powered by constant solar energy, arguing that operating in space could bypass terrestrial energy & permitting constraints. Critics warn that if the same company controls both access to orbit & major AI computing operations, it could influence which firms are able to build & run large-scale space-based compute systems. As a result, some policy experts have suggested that launch services may eventually need to be regulated as common-carrier infrastructure if orbital computing becomes strategically important, to ensure fair access to space for competing providers (here)