Max Buchan started advocating for infrastructure sovereignty when, as he puts it, “globalization and Davos were still cool.”
He felt that Western governments were quietly handing the keys to their most sensitive operations to American tech giants—and would eventually lose the ability to control what their own intelligence and infrastructure ran on. Most enterprises, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had three cloud servers—U.S., Europe, Asia—and nobody called it a vulnerability. Buchan, 24 at the time and fresh off helping take a fintech company from zero to a unicorn (which later listed on the Nasdaq at $1.2 billion), thought it was going to be catastrophic.
Buchan and co-founder Josh McLaughlin now lead Valarian, a London-based startup that builds the software layer governments and enterprises deploy underneath their AI systems to ensure it controls how that intelligence operates, what data can be accessed, and who can shut it off. McLaughlin comes to Valarian after a career as a managing director at Palantir.
Valarian has raised a $50 million Series A led by NEA, Fortune learned exclusively. The round brings total funding to $70 million and marks NEA’s first defense and dual-use investment in Europe.
The company’s software, ACRA, acts as a sealed operating room around AI workloads and sensitive applications. Government departments and businesses can keep using Amazon or Microsoft cloud infrastructure—but Valarian’s layer controls exactly what data leaves, who touches it, and when. That matters because of the U.S. CLOUD Act. American authorities can compel U.S.-based companies to hand over data they hold anywhere in the world. Buchan’s argument is that sovereignty can’t be a settings toggle inside someone else’s infrastructure. It has to be the infrastructure itself.
Valarian’s rise comes amidst several geopolitical kerfuffles. European defense spending hit $447 billion last year. An incoming U.K. prime minister is moving to cancel a state Palantir contract—part of a broader European pullback from the U.S. data giant. And, when the Trump administration cut off Anthropic’s access abroad this year, Buchan said infrastructure sovereignty shifted from an abstract policy debate to a live emergency. “No one could use their model anymore, because the president of another country had shut it off,” he told me.
NEA’s Mustafa Neemuchwala, who led the round, argues that the case for Valarian is that it sidesteps the classic defense startup trap—no production lines to blow up, no missiles to test. “If this company fails, it’s not going to be because they overspent on a production facility,” he said.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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