When we first published Building Resilience in Europe in June 2024, our argument was simple: if Europe wanted to remain relevant in a world shaped by fragmentation, technological disruption, and geopolitical competition, it needed to invest in its own resilience across energy, industry, and defense.

Eighteen months later, events have outpaced the argument. The assumptions underneath European security and prosperity—stability of alliance structures, global supply chains, energy abundance—have each been tested and found unreliable. Resilience, which now increasingly demands strategic autonomy, is no longer an ambition. It is the baseline for relevance and an existential test of Europe's social contract.

Europe's reinvigoration will not come from isolated breakthroughs. It will come from the tight entanglement of sovereign capabilities, from sensing in orbit, through AI-native defense systems, down into industrial manufacturing and the energy infrastructure that sustains it all. At General Catalyst, we invest across this stack. Here is how it connects.

Sovereignty Begins with Seeing

You cannot defend what you cannot observe. For decades, Europe's sensing capabilities relied heavily on alliance structures: effective, but dependent on priorities and infrastructure it did not control. Strategic autonomy begins with owning the means of observation.

The shift is now underway. Companies like ICEYE have demonstrated that Europe can build sovereign sensing infrastructure at commercial speed. Its Synthetic Aperture Radar constellation delivers persistent, independent monitoring, giving European governments the ability to observe borders, track movements, and coordinate response without reliance on non-European infrastructure. Through its joint venture with Rheinmetall, ICEYE has proven something essential: that Europe can combine deep technical talent, private capital, and industrial partnerships to build critical sovereign infrastructure on its own terms.

Sovereignty begins with knowing. And knowing requires owning the sensing layer. But intelligence from orbit creates deterrence only when it flows into systems that can act on it.

From Sensing to Decisions: The Defense Layer

The value of Europe's sensing layer depends entirely on what sits beneath it. This is where Helsing operates. As Europe's AI-native defense platform, Helsing fuses sensor inputs across domains, accelerates command workflows, and compresses decision cycles, turning raw intelligence into operational advantage. Its acquisition of Grob Aircraft created a sovereign pathway to pair an AI mission stack with composite airframe design and manufacturing. That capability now underpins CA-1 Europa, Helsing’s autonomous combat aircraft under development with Grob, built around the Centaur autonomy stack and designed from day one for scale and resilient European supply chains. In parallel, Helsing’s acquisition of Blue Ocean expanded its electronic warfare and sensor fusion stack; its Resilience Factory in Germany has created a model for modular production. This is how European defense will be built: software-defined, interoperable, and manufactured at scale.

Hypersonica is building Europe's sovereign hypersonic strike system, delivering its missile prototype for flight testing at unprecedented speed. They moved from concept to successful test flight in nine months, proving that Europe can build advanced defense systems at commercial speed. Only a small number of teams in Europe have the end-to-end physics, systems, and execution depth to build a sovereign hypersonic system. As a result, Europe’s hypersonic capability is becoming tangible. 

Modern deterrence is software-defined. Yet software advantage compounds only when it shapes hardware that can be produced in volume. Air defense components, autonomous systems, hypersonic platforms are where digital capability meets industrial reality. The core insight is structural: Europe's defense architecture must be layered, interoperable, and replenishable domestically. That requires an industrial base capable of building at speed and scale.

The Industrial Base: Where Deterrence Is Manufactured

Defense autonomy collapses without manufacturing autonomy. And this is Europe's most binding constraint. Or as a general at Munich Security Conference (MSC) put it: “non experts talk strategy, experts talk logistics.”

Ukraine made the lesson vivid: deterrence fails not only for lack of platforms, but for lack of replenishment. The mission-systems layer—energetics, sensors, communications, guidance subsystems—rarely attracts attention, yet it determines surge capacity and replenishment speed for the platforms and systems above it. Across Europe, this layer remains fragmented and under-capitalized. Supply-chain infrastructure is deterrence infrastructure.

Most capital concentrates at the extremes: early-stage defense software or late-stage prime contractors. The critical middle—where prototypes become production lines, where engineering breakthroughs become manufactured systems—is where European defense most often stalls.

Onodrim is aggregating this fragmented landscape, consolidating mission-critical suppliers across energetics, sensors, and communications into a coherent industrial platform to enable the scale we need. PhysicsX is embedding AI-driven simulation into engineering workflows, compressing design cycles that once took months into days. Dryft is modernizing procurement and purchasing inside factories themselves—the operational layer where inefficiency quietly compounds.

Scaling defense manufacturing toward air defense systems, autonomous platforms, and hypersonic vehicles demands more than capital. It demands a credible customer. The binding constraint is often not investment; it is contracts. When procurement pathways are opaque and fragmented across twenty-seven national systems, risk premiums rise and the cost of capital increases. When governments provide multi-year frameworks, credible purchase commitments, and a clear path from pilot to program-of-record, private capital scales rapidly behind them. This is exactly the gap we’re focused on through the General Catalyst Institute (GCI) and our SPARTA program (Strategic Protection and Advanced Resilience Technology Alliance): making procurement pathways legible, accelerating the pilot-to-program transition, and turning demand signals into something industry can build against.

Procurement is industrial policy. Contracts are capital signals. And Europe's fragmentation remains its self-imposed cost of capital. 

Energy: The Foundation Layer

None of this works without power. Manufacturing satellites, air defense systems, and advanced components at scale is impossible without reliable, competitively priced, and stress-resilient energy. Europe's bottleneck has shifted from renewable generation to system performance: grid flexibility, storage, and dynamic demand coordination are now the binding constraints. Energy flexibility is defense capability.

Coordinated Capital Across the Stack

At General Catalyst, we approach resilience as a coherent capital strategy, not a collection of sector bets. We invest where sensing connects to decision systems, where software connects to hardware, where hardware connects to manufacturing depth, and where manufacturing connects to energy resilience. The through-line is acting as a “do tank”, not a “think tank”.

Europe has a narrow window. The principle should be clear: test broadly, then select and scale. Build interoperable systems. Back the platforms capable of reaching global relevance. Avoid perpetual fragmentation.

The foundations are stronger than the discourse suggests. Europe possesses deep density in applied engineering: physicists, aerospace designers, robotics engineers, industrial systems builders. A new generation of founders, many returning from global innovation hubs, is choosing to build in defense, manufacturing, and infrastructure. Not because it is fashionable, but because it is consequential. The opportunity now is to align institutional frameworks with this resurgence of ambition. Through the General Catalyst Institute and the EU AI Champions Initiative, we are working to make that alignment real:  connecting founders directly with policymakers, shaping procurement frameworks, and accelerating AI adoption across Europe's industrial base.

If Europe improves procurement signal quality, the capital stack broadens rapidly: from venture and growth equity to private credit, working-capital finance, and ultimately public markets. Scaled, interoperable champions become financeable across the full spectrum.

Europe's challenge has never been invention. It has been throughput. When space-based sensing integrates with AI-native defense systems, when those systems rest on modernized industrial supply chains, when factories operate with intelligent manufacturing, and when energy infrastructure sustains production under stress, that is when policy becomes deployed capability. And that is when capital markets transform from observers into force multipliers. From orbit to factory floor, sovereignty is manufactured.