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NEWS In defence partnership news, the UK and the EU signed an expansive new agreement to deepen security and defence cooperation across a broad range of areas. The pact aims to fill the void left by an increasingly unpredictable American security umbrella. It commits Britain to EU-led capability planning, maritime security operations, cyber-defence, and backing for Ukraine, supported by access to the EU’s €150bn SAFE fund. Europe is retracing a familiar path, one it first walked in the 1950s when it tried (and failed) to create a unified defence pillar under the European Defence Community, and again in the 1990s with the WEU and ESDP. Both were initiatives aimed at reducing dependence on the American security umbrella. The deal welcomes Britain back into the continental fabric of defence capability. It also underscores diverging priorities: where Washington casts China as the primary adversary, Europe is responding to the Russian threat on its doorstep. In quantum computing news, IonQ, a publicly-traded American quantum computing company, is acquiring Oxford Ionics in a $1.1bn stock deal that ranks among the largest in quantum computing. Oxford Ionics, a six-year-old startup based in Oxford, has raised approximately $53m. The recent increase in IonQ’s share price has enabled it to go on an acquisition spree - Oxford Ionics is the fourth company it has acquired in 2025 and positions IonQ as the dominant player in the industry. No other company has been as broad or aggressive in its acquisitions. I led the investment into Oxford Ionics for NSSIF. The founders, Chris and Tom, had an incredible vision for how they were going to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer and had already achieved 99.99% fidelity - a number unmatched by any other company. This is a nice outcome for the founders but feels like an early conclusion. As a developer of ion traps, Oxford Ionics was a direct competitor to IonQ. It’s possible - indeed likely - that their technology would have outperformed that of IonQ. They might eventually have overtaken them in the race for quantum supremacy. That is presumably part of IonQ’s rationale. In space news, Russia’s newest satellite in its low Earth orbit (LEO) Cosmos series is in orbit near an unnamed US government satellite, according to US Space Command. This further stokes suspicions that the Cosmos satellites are co-orbital anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons rather than simply neighbourhood watch birds, as Moscow claims. This is, admittedly, not new. I’ve written recently about Chinese capability in this area. And this marks the fourth time in five years that Moscow has deployed a satellite close to American government satellites. But what to do about it? One thing appears certain: demand for technologies that detect, monitor, and protect space assets will intensify. Elsewhere, the US Space Force awarded BAE a $1.2bn contract to provide 10 missile-tracking satellites for a constellation in medium Earth orbit. This is a reminder that defence primes are still out there, scooping up $1.2bn contracts. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this kind of innovative tech would have to be built by a startup. But BAE Systems Space is no slouch. FUNDRAISING Lendurai, an Estonia-based developer of a system which enables drones to operate without GNSS using computer vision and AI, providing autonomous navigation solutions for defence and public sector UAVs, raised a €5.5m Series A round led by Expeditions, HCVC and VSquared. Lendurai is an Expeditions portfolio company. Anduril, a US-based builder of AI-powered defence systems such as drones, autonomous submarines, and surveillance tools, raised a $2.5bn round at a $30.5 billion post-money valuation. The deal was led by Founders Fund, which contributed $1 billion of the total investment. Impulse Space, a US-based developer of in-space mobility vehicles, raised $300m in Series C funding. The round was led by Linse Capital. iRocket, a US-based developer of space launch capability, signed a letter of intent to merge with BPGC Acquisition Corp as part of an effort to take the company public. If completed, the merger will bring iRocket onto the Nasdaq with an expected valuation of approximately $400m. Altura, a Netherlands-based developer of an AI platform to deploy autonomous AI agents specifically for procurement processes, raised €8m Series A round, led by Octopus Ventures.
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