00:00So you've raised the capital, you've come through, of course, you've been in a quiet period, essentially,
00:04as you've built out the services and the products and raised this additional capital.
00:09Talk to us about what you guys do in an environment, of course, that heightened focus on our security vulnerabilities and the risks.
00:16For sure. Firstly, thanks for having me bright and early this morning.
00:18I think it's a really interesting time in history, geopolitically speaking.
00:22I never went about to build a defence firm where Valerian was born out of an enterprise need to protect sovereign data.
00:30So if you're an airline or a bank and you operate between many different nationalities,
00:34it's oftentimes really difficult to ring fence data in specific jurisdictions, whether that's Germany, France, Saudi Arabia, wherever that needs to be.
00:41And you're right. It took us a couple of years to build very complex software, essentially to compartmentalise and silo data where it needs to be.
00:48What happened last year was really interesting.
00:51We were approached by a couple of defensive institutions to utilise the same platform, but for national security prerequisites.
00:58And I think for me, it's been a fascinating experience spinning up a defence arm.
01:02My co-founder spent 18 years serving in the US Special Forces and then spent about 12 years at Palantir Technologies, which we all know.
01:09And our chairman co-founded a business called Darktrace in the UK, which was tremendously successful.
01:13So for us, the core team's been phenomenal.
01:16And it's a really interesting time, as I said, in history, obviously, with increased NATO spending and being in the UK, it's a really interesting place to build.
01:23So you have that team, you have that experience between you as well, within the world of finance, within the world of defence, Palantir, Darktrace, with all that pedigree.
01:30What is the demand that you, where is that demand coming from?
01:32Are you seeing more demand now for that sovereign solution versus enterprise?
01:37How is that breaking down?
01:38And what are they going to be the key kind of revenue drivers for you going forward?
01:41What does the picture look like?
01:42For sure.
01:42I mean, look, it's a great question.
01:44I started building this with more of a kind of like macro political view on the world, right?
01:49I lived through Brexit, being a Brit here.
01:51We've got the fight for Ukraine.
01:53Hong Kong ceased earlier than we anticipated.
01:55And now the question mark over Taiwan, right?
01:56So I think for me, it was always these ideas of physical sovereignty, the next frontier would be digital sovereignty.
02:03That's not just on a national security level.
02:05It's also for enterprises.
02:07You know, I had a background in finance, as you rightly said.
02:09We were so regulated that data exfiltration became a really big talking point for us.
02:14So our offices between Sweden and Paris and London, none of that really sensitive data, even in the enterprise, even in financial institutions, none of that could change hands.
02:22But now we're in a position, obviously, of doing that on a national level and thinking about defensive institutions.
02:28So it is a very interesting place to sit.
02:30And I think that the last point I'd make is, for me, there's a bit of an arbitrage going on in the sense of, yes, we just raised a bunch more capital, but only from U.S. investors, right?
02:39Really great investors like Scalp.
02:41This is in Austin, Texas, a big defense fund, one of the early Palantir backers.
02:45But deploying that capital here with the knowledge and capital from the U.S., but deploying it in the U.K. and Europe, for me, it's been a fascinating journey.
02:52And, you know, there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in Europe.
02:55Obviously, you know, we've got Helsing, our answer to Anderil, you know.
03:00So you raised uniquely from the U.S.
03:02Is that because you were looking to raise in the U.S.?
03:04Or is it because European investors were not seeing the opportunities that U.S. investors were seeing?
03:09So our first couple of capital rounds were in Europe.
03:11But we got to a kind of scale, I think, that we had to go to the U.S.
03:14I mean, not just for capital, but also for the knowledge base.
03:17And we had some great investors here.
03:19I mean, one British national security fund here, for instance, called MD1, set up by a couple of British Special Forces operatives who became venture capitalists.
03:27But I think given the stage that we're at, the maturity of the product, our underlying platform, we went to the U.S., raised the capitals from some phenomenal institutions.
03:36And we've really been deploying it here between London and the U.S.
03:39Who are the biggest threats right now?
03:40Is it sovereign actors?
03:41And if so, who's top of that list?
03:43Or is it rogue groups of hackers?
03:45I mean, we've seen retailers recently in the last few weeks in the U.K. targeted.
03:49How do you rank the threats?
03:51It's a really good question.
03:52I mean, it's, you know, I think my answer to that slightly depends on the day of the week and what we're seeing day to day at Valerian.
03:58But I think the reality is, you know, the threat can be anything from malicious and malign actors.
04:03But it can also go back to regulation.
04:04It can be also that piece.
04:05There's also a threat to businesses of falling the foul of regulation and the cost basis to that.
04:11But I think on a more general level, I mean, look, we all see the geopolitical shifts.
04:14We all see the kind of tensions between emerging or current superpowers.
04:19So we think about that a lot.
04:20We do see a lot of things that obviously I can't talk about massively.
04:23We see a lot of fascinating things occur every day.
04:26So we're just trying to build the infrastructural solutions to protect that on a daily basis.
04:30We're just trying to build the infrastructural solutions to protect that on a daily basis.
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