LONDON — Valarian, a London-based technology firm, has raised $50 million in Series A funding to accelerate deployment of its software layer that allows governments and companies to maintain data sovereignty while using American cloud infrastructure. The round was led by NEA, marking the venture firm's first defense and dual-use investment in Europe.
Closing the CLOUD Act Gap
The company, founded by Max Buchan and former Palantir managing director Josh McLaughlin, addresses a primary concern for international clients of American cloud providers: the U.S. CLOUD Act. The legislation permits U.S. authorities to compel American-headquartered companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world. Valarian’s core product, ACRA, isolates sensitive artificial intelligence workloads and data, ensuring that the customer, not the cloud provider or a foreign government, controls access and the kill switch.
“No one could use their model anymore, because the president of another country had shut it off,” Buchan said, referencing a recent U.S. administration action that cut off an American AI company’s access abroad. The incident transformed infrastructure sovereignty from policy debate to operational emergency for European entities.
Valarian’s software does not require clients to abandon existing contracts with dominant infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Instead, it acts as a governing envelope, filtering what data leaves a closed environment and enforcing strict permissioning. This model directly serves a growing market moving to repatriate digital control without incurring the massive expense and delay of building independent national clouds.
Capital and the Defense Pullback
The $50 million injection brings Valarian’s total funding to $70 million. NEA’s Mustafa Neemuchwala highlighted that the capital-efficient, software-centric model avoids the production bottlenecks typical of defense hardware startups. The investment arrives as European defense spending hit $447 billion last year and political sentiment shifts. The incoming U.K. government is moving to cancel a state contract with Palantir, part of a broader review of reliance on U.S. data processors. Valarian positions its technology as an immediate, pragmatic fix for enterprises seeking to reduce foreign jurisdictional reach over domestic operations while continuing to leverage global infrastructure.