France's €57.1B defence budget comes with a catch for foreign startups
What's the deal? Keen Venture PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has published a white paper mapping how European defence tech founders can sell to the French military. It is Keen's fourth European procurement guide, and it details which of the ministry's six families of buyers actually pays and where companies lose a year before reaching a contract.
Why now? France will spend €57.1 billion on defence in 2026 and is rearming faster than at any point in a generation. The August 2026 update of the loi de programmation militaire added €36 billion over 2026–2030 and set defence spending at 2.5% of GDP by 2030.
The money isn't the obstacle — its shape is. The Direction générale de l'armement (DGA) placed €38 billion of orders in 2025, more than double the prior year. But France signs multi-year equipment contracts and votes the cash one year at a time, leaving roughly nine tenths of the equipment budget committed to long-running programmes.
What could go wrong? France buys from its own industry first: 92% of what the DGA paid out in 2024 went to companies based in France. A founder can spend a year winning over soldiers only to learn the product cannot be bought, because the functional need and the technical rules are judged by different people.
What's shifted? Since March 2025, the procédure d'acquisition réactive has been the standing fast route for a named urgent need. The centres experts référents, created in late 2025, bring the DGA, the military, and industry together with their own budgets, and the August 2026 law obliges public buyers to prefer a sovereign European drone system.
Why bother? France is the world's second-largest arms exporter, with nearly 10% of global transfers, according to SIPRI. A French order is the reference foreign buyers ask about first. "It's worth the export door it opens, to the Gulf, Southeast Asia, the Nordics and beyond," said Eric Fournier, chief executive officer and co-founder of Gallium DefenseDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
The signal: France cared about sovereignty long before it became fashionable elsewhere, from nuclear deterrence to who hosts data. For founders, that makes the market both one of Europe's hardest to enter and one of its most valuable once inside — but the real path, Fournier argues, is aggregating across envelopes rather than waiting on any single programme.
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Image credit: Generated with Gemini
