Interview: Quentin Dupraz

Could you describe your investment philosophy and approach to selecting portfolio companies?

At Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital, we focus on venture capital investments in DefenceTech, backing entrepreneurs who develop mission-critical technologies with the potential to redefine security and resilience across NATO and NATO partner countries. The defence sector is undergoing a historic shift: as geopolitical tensions intensify, NATO countries are expected to raise defence spending to as much as 5% of GDP by 2035, effectively more than doubling current levels. This represents hundreds of billions in additional annual expenditure, creating unprecedented demand for innovation and digitalization.

In this environment, the dominance of traditional incumbents is increasingly challenged by technology-driven newcomers such as Palantir and Anduril. This shift not only disrupts the established order but also creates the very playbook for technology-driven exits, exactly what we seek to capture.

While defence investments have historically carried a higher degree of sensitivity, we believe their ultimate purpose is to protect Western democracies and safeguard the societal values that underpin open and free societies.

Our investment philosophy centres on backing exceptional early-stage founders with deep technical expertise, scalable solutions, and a clear path to strategic relevance. Beyond market potential, we assess how each company contributes to strengthening Europe’s technological sovereignty and long-term security. Investment selection ultimately boils down to a combination of rigorous technical due diligence conducted in close collaboration with our established network of defence experts, ensuring we identify innovators capable of moving from cutting-edge research to commercial successes. In early-stage investing, the products evolve, but it’s the founder’s grit and execution that compound into real disruption. This is what we are after.

What principles guide your portfolio construction and approach to supporting portfolio companies?

In constructing the fund portfolio, we focus on Seed to Series B DefenceTech companies, typically investing from EUR 700k onwards. By investing across NATO and NATO partner countries, the fund ensures broad geographic coverage and diversified geopolitical exposure, maintaining the option to invest in markets such as the United States as the leading global DefenceTech ecosystem. This focus is reinforced by the fact that 63% of the EU’s defence procurement still flows to US suppliers, and that 66% of European DefenceTech venture funding in 2024 originated from US investors, underscoring the US as the reference market for scale and adoption.

Our strategy is designed to balance early-stage risk with strategic impact, maintaining enough follow-on capacity to protect against dilution in subsequent funding rounds, retain meaningful ownership, and ensure companies remain sufficiently capitalized to face long sales and procurement cycles in an industry where contracts often come in larger bulks from governments or industrial primes rather than B2C channels.

We select companies where we can add unique value beyond capital. In DefenceTech, this often means facilitating access to testing capabilities, operational feedback, and connections with primes and governmental organisations through our established network. We are for example, a founding member of LuxDefence ASBL, a member of the Estonian Defence and Aerospace Industry Association (EDIA), and we partnered with the Swiss Innovation Forces. This offers our portfolio companies unique access to mission-critical ecosystems and strategic pathways that incumbents guard closely, precisely the leverage needed to build defensible businesses and position them for technology-driven exits.

How do you source new investment opportunities and maintain relationships with potential portfolio companies?

In venture, as in other investment industries, the best opportunities are rarely found in the open market. They come through trusted networks and close engagement with the people solving critical challenges. In Defence, deal sourcing is more complex, as many promising technologies emerge from secretive and classified environments, making proprietary access essential.

We spend significant time engaging with military operators, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders who have firsthand insight into today’s security challenges. The trust built through proximity to this ecosystem, combined with our track record as an early DefenceTech investor since 2020, gives us consistent access to high-quality, often proprietary deal flow.

Maintaining relationships with potential portfolio companies is deliberate and selective. We go beyond providing capital, creating mutually beneficial partnerships by opening doors, offering technological and sector expertise, and acting as a true go-to-market enabler. In this secretive, relationship-driven industry, our value lies in helping founders secure the partnerships and credibility needed to win large governmental and industrial contracts.

What are the challenges and opportunities you most actively face and foresee from your investment focus and activities?

One of the core challenges of the sector is that defence investing has historically been perceived as politically and ethically sensitive, deterring investors. However, this perception is changing. In 2025, DefenceTech venture funding in NATO countries has already exceeded USD9.1bn by September, 1.4 times 2024 levels, with the sector on track to grow 132%+ YoY.

Another challenge lies in the distinction between single-use and dual-use technologies. Single-use technologies are primarily for military applications, whereas dual-use technologies serve both military and civilian purposes. While dual-use offers broader market potential, it can complicate early-stage ventures by “imposing” founders to balance military and commercial requirements under the limited resources they usually have. Our approach is to focus on entrepreneurs initially serving their ideal defence customer profile and later extending to dual-use applications, allowing for a more focused and manageable growth trajectory. Because in the end, developing a defence and civilian product/solution ultimately.

On the opportunity side, DefenceTech investments are a necessary pillar of modern investment strategy, enhancing technological superiority and enabling nations to retain sovereign values amid increasing geopolitical tensions, a key advantage for autonomy and security. Many of the world’s most influential technological advancements have also originated from defence research; for example, the internet began as ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defence project aimed at creating a resilient communication network during the Cold War. Such innovations highlight the broader societal potential of DefenceTech investments.

Could you shed light on current portfolio companies in the sector, and what factors drove your investment selection process?

The fund’s first investment was a Seed round in Estonia’s 5.0 Robotics, which develops deployable, self-contained CNC solutions that allow defence actors to manufacture essential components at the point of need or via remote control, addressing supply chain frictions and limited local production. By making industrial-grade CNC precision accessible to SMEs and defence users, the company is opening a new market segment and democratizing advanced manufacturing with a portable, affordable, and plug-and-play platform.

The Fund also invested into San Francisco based Aerobotics7 as part of a pre-seed round. Aerobotics7 is a U.S.-based pioneer in autonomous physical threat detection technology and the first patent-pending system for real-time detection of buried metallic, non-metallic landmines and UXOs. Aerobotics7’s multi-sensor fusion radar and proprietary AI platform, trained on subsurface threat patterns, represent a breakthrough in landmines and UXO detection, operating at speeds up to 50 times faster than traditional demining methods.

Born out of a research project by then 13-year-old Harshwardhan Zala, joined by Aeronautical Engineer and co-founder Urvashi Kikani, Aerobotics7 has grown into a mission-driven dual-use startup building state-of-the-art technology to save countless lives.