Valarian raises $50M for sovereign AI
Valarian raised a $50M Series A led by NEA, its first European defense investment, to grow ACRA, a control layer for sovereign AI infrastructure.
Valarian, a London startup founded by Max Buchan and Josh McLaughlin, a former US Army officer and Palantir executive, raised a $50 million Series A on July 13, led by New Enterprise Associates. It is NEA’s first defense or dual-use investment in Europe. Lightbank, XTX Markets, Sequel, and LitVC joined, alongside angels Gokul Rajaram and Nikesh Arora. Total funding reaches $70 million, on top of a $20 million seed round.
The product, ACRA, is a control layer that runs on Kubernetes and sits over any cloud, public, on-premises, or air-gapped. It isolates AI models, agents, and other sensitive workloads so a government or enterprise decides exactly who touches the data and how, and customers hold their own encryption keys, so Valarian has no access once a deployment is live. Buchan has pointed directly at the US export-control order that cut off foreign access to Anthropic’s frontier models this summer as the moment that made the pitch obvious, telling Fortune:
No one could use their model anymore, because the president of another country had shut it off.
UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan has publicly backed Valarian as part of Britain’s push to build sovereign AI capability.
What it means for operators
ACRA is a bet that the control layer, not the model or the cloud underneath it, becomes the thing regulated buyers actually shop for. It lands the same week as Helsing’s $1.8B raise, another sign that European investors are now writing real checks for defense-adjacent AI infrastructure, and it sits next to the wider fight over who gets to run frontier models where. If you sell into government or regulated sectors, this is a vendor category worth watching even if Valarian itself never crosses your desk.