Valarian, a London startup, has raised $50 million（約80億円） to build a software layer that lets governments and enterprises keep using major cloud providers while maintaining full control over their data and AI systems. The funding comes as the U.S. CLOUD Act and recent trade restrictions have made governments and businesses urgently want independence from American cloud infrastructure; the round marks venture capital's growing focus on geopolitical sovereignty in tech infrastructure.
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Valarian, a London-based startup founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin, has raised $50 million（約80億円） in Series A funding led by NEA. The company builds software called ACRA that sits between governments and enterprises and their cloud infrastructure, controlling what data leaves and who can access it—even when using Amazon or Microsoft servers.
Why it matters
The U.S. CLOUD Act allows American authorities to compel U.S.-based companies to hand over data worldwide. Buchan argues that true sovereignty cannot rely on settings toggles inside foreign infrastructure; it must be the infrastructure itself. Recent geopolitical events—the Trump administration cutting off Anthropic's access abroad and European pullback from U.S. data providers—have shifted infrastructure sovereignty from abstract policy to urgent practical need.
What to watch
The $50 million（約80億円） Series A brings Valarian's total funding to $70 million（約110億円） and marks NEA's first defense and dual-use investment in Europe. Buchan previously helped take a fintech company from zero to a unicorn, which later listed on the Nasdaq at $1.2 billion（約1900億円）.
Valarian emerges from a decade-long conviction by founder Max Buchan that Western governments were quietly losing control of their most sensitive operations by relying on American cloud providers. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, most enterprises had three cloud servers across the U.S., Europe, and Asia without calling it a vulnerability; Buchan believed this was catastrophic exposure. The startup's timing aligns with a marked shift in geopolitical reality. European defense budgets have grown substantially ($447 billion（約72兆円） last year), and high-profile policy moves—the U.K. government's move to cancel its Palantir contract and the Trump administration's cutoff of Anthropic's international access—have transformed infrastructure sovereignty from a theoretical concern into a live emergency. When a foreign president can shut off access to a company's model globally, the case for control at the infrastructure layer, not the application layer, becomes self-evident.
NEA's decision to lead the round, and to mark it as the firm's first European defense and dual-use investment, signals that venture capital is treating geopolitical resilience as a defensible business problem. The investor's framing is telling: Valarian sidesteps the "classic defense startup trap" of production lines and hardware testing, instead offering a software layer that governments can deploy beneath their existing cloud arrangements. Buchan's prior success taking a fintech company to unicorn status and a Nasdaq listing at $1.2 billion（約1900億円）, combined with co-founder Josh McLaughlin's background as a managing director at Palantir, suggests deep domain expertise in both rapid scaling and government-grade infrastructure. The $70 million（約110億円） in total funding (including the earlier seed round) positions Valarian to address what appears to be a structural vulnerability that recent policy shocks have moved from board-level discussions to urgent procurement cycles.
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