Defence Tech Meetup
Join us for the third closed Defence Tech Meetup, organised with a goal to connect the Latvian Defence Tech ecosystem with other nations and to explore the latest initiatives and discuss current priorities. This is an unofficial event that prioritises networking opportunities designed to foster collaboration, exchange of information and necessary changes within the defence sector.
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Our first item of the agenda is a panel discussion about Defence Tech Funding: fantasies and realities.
This panel discussion will explore the realities of funding for defence tech startups, now that three years of war in Ukraine has both re-energized defence investing but also exposed the challenges of investments in this sector. Many new VC funds have been established during the past year, grant programs funded and debt options are also multiplying. But many questions are arising:
How many venture scale startups will there really be in the defence industry - will there be more or less than in other tech sectors?
What advice would the panelists give to pre-seed/seed stage startups setting out on their journey, how to think about the various funding options?
What is different about this industry vs other tech industries and how will that impact investments?
This panel will aim at clarifying the options, surfacing the realities and discussing where this could all end up.
The panel will be moderated by co-organizer of the meetup Andris K. Berzins (Partner at Change Ventures, a leading Baltic pre-seed/seed fund and co-founder/board member of Startup House Riga). Andris, whose fund is an investor in Origin Robotics, the Latvian UAV startup, will be joined by several experienced defence investors. They include Premysl Rubes, partner at Presto Ventures, a Czech Republic based defence tech fund, as well as Toomas Bergman, a family office investor who was founder of Vegevisir, the first investor in Estonia's startups Milrem and SensusQ and investor in Orqa FPV among others.
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This meetup is organised in partnership with Drone Summit (organised by the Ministry of Defence of Latvia, in cooperation with Riga Technical University), commemorating the first anniversary of the Drone Coalition for Ukraine (registration for the Drone Summit ends on May 15).
To encourage openness and the sharing of information, this meetup will be conducted under the Chatham House Rule. This means that participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed. This rule is designed to foster a greater freedom of discussion. It is our aim to create a safe space for honest and direct conversations.
Defence Tech Meetup is an invitation-only event, and will gather representatives of the government and armed forces, researchers, defence sector companies, association, investors and technology developers looking for a platform to discuss current challenges, ideas and collaboration opportunities in the sector. If there is someone you think should be invited, please contact the organisers.