The tech industry considered Helsing’s $223 million Series B deal as more indication that defense was firmly back on the investing agenda.
More confirmation comes today in the form of a $5.5 million seed round led by Germany’s Project A Ventures for U.K. military tech company Labrys Technologies, which was shared exclusively with TechCrunch. MD One Ventures, Marque VC, Offset Ventures, and Expeditions Fund were also present. The money will be utilized to grow the development and research and development teams, as well as the commercial sales staff.
For both military and humanitarian circumstances, labrys is best defined as slack-meets-location-meets-payments. While it is a mouthful, it starts to make more sense when you consider the challenges that the product is intended to solve. 
WhatsApp is widely utilized in fast-paced scenarios such as a humanitarian catastrophe. And, as someone who is interested in the issue, I have personal experience with this. When I launched the Techfugees NGO in 2015, we discovered that both refugees and humanitarian workers nearly always utilized WhatsApp to organize a response. It was easy to use, functioned over slow networks, was quick, and could disclose positions. Its shortcomings, however, are all too clear. How can you tell whether you’re working with a genuine humanitarian worker? What if they don’t divulge where they are? How can you get resources or money from them? These are significant issues that must be addressed.
“WhatsApp is very problematic when it comes to managing large teams worldwide because the communications are end-to-end encrypted,” co-founder and CEO August Lersten told me in an interview. It may often be tough to authenticate and confirm who you’re conversing with on the other end of the telephone. And you can’t combine all of these separate conversations into what we call a network coordination tree. If I want to talk to 133 individuals in Indonesia, I don’t need 133 distinct individual conversations.”
As a result, a Labrys client receives a screen dashboard where a user, similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams, may communicate with whole teams or individuals and know their current position. You may also pay them (kind of).
The platform of the veteran-owned firm efficiently “scratched an itch” that the founders discovered via their own work “in the field.” Lersten is a former Royal Marine Commando who oversaw missions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Luke Wattam (co-founder and COO) has experience working with the UK Ministry of Defence, FCDO, and UK allies.
The Labrys platform, Axiom C2 and Axiom Communicator, enables KYC/E verification, encrypted conversations, task management, and the geolocation of individual users. Finally, it incorporates digital payments using crypto stablecoins. In other words, you can know who you’re working with, where they are, and how to pay them. This is especially true when dealing with humanitarian situations.
“I see my people through a geospatial interface,” Lersten said. Having that interface distinguishes you from other communication channels such as WhatsApp and Slack. The second component is communication with those dots, which may be anywhere in Afghanistan. Then I’d want to compensate my employees. I can pay them in USD stablecoins using the same interface.”
According to Labrys, the platform has already shown its utility in the field.
It’s been utilized in Afghanistan, where it aided in the evacuation of 5,000 oppressed Afghan minorities, as well as by Ukrainian State Emergency Services following the Kakhovka Dam break.
“As a commander, I always need to see where my team is when they are on a mission, especially in a high-risk environment like Ukraine,” Mykola Taranenko, commander of the Kherson Regional Rapid Response Team of the Ukrainian Red Cross (and a Labrys customer), told Eltrys via email. I can safely monitor the position and status of my team using Axiom, organize contributions, and convert digital payments into real-world effects swiftly. “Buy equipment locally so that donors can see where their money is going.”
The context in which Labrys operates is unique, with several civilian and military solutions overlapping. Everbridge, for example, is an enterprise software solution that provides customers—often military and non-governmental organizations—with an awareness of global flashpoints. It, however, lacks the ability to communicate with people “on the ground,” like Labrys does. TAK, for example, is a “Blue Force” tracking system. Meanwhile, Premise Data, which has secured $146 million in funding, offers a software platform for humanitarian groups as well as analytics regarding assets on the ground.
Meanwhile, Improbable, EclecticIQ, Living Optics, and Preligens are all European firms that have recently garnered tens of millions, if not millions, of dollars in investment.
The announcement confirms trends that began last year, when venture capital firms invested $7 billion in aerospace and military industries in the United States.
