Valarian raises $50M Series A to loosen America's grip on government cloud data
What's the deal? ValarianDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a London-based startup, has raised a $50 million Series A led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The round brings total funding to $70 million and marks NEA's first defense and dual-use investment in Europe.
What's the endgame? Founders Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin — a former managing director at Palantir — built ACRA, a software layer that governments and enterprises run underneath their AI systems. It lets them keep using AmazonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → or Microsoft cloud infrastructure while controlling exactly what data leaves, who touches it, and when.
Why does it matter? The pitch centres on the US CLOUD Act, which lets American authorities compel US companies to hand over data they hold anywhere in the world. Buchan's argument: "sovereignty can't be a settings toggle inside someone else's infrastructure. It has to be the infrastructure itself."
Why now? European defense spending hit $447 billion last year, and an incoming UK prime minister is moving to cancel a state Palantir contract. Buchan said the issue became a live emergency when the Trump administration cut off Anthropic's overseas access this year: "No one could use their model anymore, because the president of another country had shut it off."
By the numbers: The $50 million round ranks among the largest of its kind, sitting in the 96th percentile of all-time Series A rounds for UK legal-sector startups, based on a sample of 69 deals.
What could go wrong? NEA's Mustafa Neemuchwala, who led the round, argues Valarian sidesteps the classic defense startup trap. "If this company fails, it's not going to be because they overspent on a production facility," he said.
The signal: The raise reflects a broader European pullback from US data giants, as governments and enterprises reassess the risk of running sensitive operations on infrastructure controlled from abroad. Sovereignty, once an abstract policy debate, is becoming a procurement decision.
Read more: Fortune
