Investing in the future of security in Europe with Expeditions' Samuel Burrell

Samuel Burrell is a partner at Expeditions, a leading European venture capital firm investing in defense technology, quantum computing, space, cybersecurity, and semiconductors.

What led you from the Royal Marines to venture capital?

Since the invention of military force, soldiers have always been users of cutting-edge technology. One of my roles before leaving the Royal Marines was testing new technologies and deciding whether they were a fit for the missions we were doing. New technology became something I was passionate about and wanted to build into the rest of my career.

I left the Royal Marines about a decade ago and joined a Rocket Internet startup in London where I headed up operations. It was an on-demand dry cleaning business, which turned out to be a fascinating way to learn about building a company. In an early-stage startup, the inputs generate outcomes really quickly. If we increased marketing spend week over week, we would get more orders through the app. That was great until operations broke and you had to hire more drivers, which pushed costs up. It was like a mini MBA. 

During that time, I worked with an angel investor who introduced me to early stage venture investing and I realized I wanted to move to the investment side. I did an MBA at INSEAD in 2016, then cut my teeth at Octopus Ventures, where I really learned the craft of venture capital. After that I spent time at a family office investing in fintech and blockchain, before moving to NSSIF, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. 

With my military background I found that it was a natural environment for me.  I started making investments into defense and security technologies at a moment when there was a global inflection in security technology. We invested heavily into quantum computing in 2022 and 2023, and I was lucky enough to lead that effort. That set me on the trajectory to join Expeditions as a partner about a year ago.

What is Expeditions' investment thesis?

We invest in the future of security in Europe. We believe we're going through an inflection point where Europe is rebuilding, re-awakening, re-industrializing, and rearming after decades of underinvesting in national security infrastructure and technology. We think that's a huge opportunity over the next decade as Europe looks to recreate capabilities it has lost.

In terms of the technologies we're interested in, our focus extends to defense tech, which was the dominant sector for security investors in 2025, but also quantum computing, space technology, cybersecurity, semiconductors, and broadly anything that touches national security. The fund is headquartered in Warsaw and we invest across Europe, with a few investments in the U.S. We straddle the U.K. and Poland in terms of our offices, but we are pan-European in scope. We have strong connections to the U.K. Ministry of Defence and the U.K. intelligence community, and the same in Poland. So where we have a portfolio company in one country looking to expand into the other, we can make those introductions.

We write first cheques ranging from a few hundred thousand to about 5 million euros, which puts us at pre-seed through early Series A. We find that early stage founders benefit most from our experience taking companies from zero to one, where they're looking to create their first product, find product-market fit, and identify the right customers.

What do you look for in a defense tech founder?

We index heavily on founder-market fit. What we really like to see is founders who have a strong understanding of the problem sets in the market they're going after. Perhaps they had a career in intelligence or the special forces and have a burning desire to solve a problem they encountered firsthand. Individuals with a deep understanding of a problem and a strong desire to solve it tend to make excellent founders.

But we don't restrict ourselves to that. We also have portfolio companies led by young founders who came out of university and are generational talents going after some of the hardest problems. They have an understanding of a technology they worked on at university and that gives them a real edge. Both types share common traits: they strive for excellence and are driven by something greater than just financial return. They're looking to change the world in some way. Whether you're coming out of a technical Ph.D. program or out of special forces selection, you're driven by something deep within you. We find that those people make great founding teams.

What is the most common mistake defense tech founders make?

Not thinking big enough. You often see people trying to solve a discrete element of defense where they've identified a requirement. Founders coming out of the military can carry a kind of cultural bias or a learned behavior where their thinking stays within a particular band. In the military, you're banded by rank. Your scope of responsibility stops where your boss's begins, and extends down to where your subordinates are. You never need to think about things more strategic than your level because that is literally beyond your pay grade.

People who have spent a long time in the military can come out with a baked-in assumption that they should only think within their remit. What we're looking for in founders is the opposite: unlimited ambition. Of course, you want to solve a relatively narrow problem at the beginning to prove a product or thesis. But your vision should be huge. You should be looking to build a generational company. That's something we often coach our founders on. You don't see this as much with younger founders who haven't been through that strict, disciplined environment.

How does your frontline experience shape the way you evaluate defense tech products?

I always try to put myself in the shoes of the user when I'm evaluating a product that a founder is pitching. One of the most important things to consider is how it fits into the ecosystem that already exists. In the British military, and I'm sure this is true for every military in the world, there are legacy systems that do eventually get replaced but are pretty immovable in the first instance, especially for an early stage company developing a first product.

The question a founder should ask is: How does my product communicate with the existing infrastructure so that it's a seamless transition for the user? You don't want to introduce increased friction when a soldier is carrying out a mission. To understand that friction, you have to recognize that there are many pieces of kit and platforms they're already using that might not be perfect but that they have to use. Integration is critical. If a new product integrates well with existing systems, it becomes easy to use and you're going to get a strong demand signal from your first users. That's the best way to get traction and work toward product-market fit.

What will the next five years in defense tech look like?

We're going through a generational change in defense technology driven by autonomy. We've seen it most visibly in Ukraine with UAVs, and it will change the way tactics are deployed on the battlefield. It will eventually extend beyond the air to the ground, sea and undersea battle spaces as well.

Right now, the companies that will dominate this sector are in the process of being built. Some already exist, and some might be born today. Over the next three to four years, we'll see winners emerge. At that point there will be a round of consolidation. The neoprimes, companies like Helsing, Anduril, and others, will begin to acquire competitors to expand their reach, perhaps geographically. In some cases they've been expanding horizontally to acquire new capabilities, but they haven't started absorbing the competition yet. It simply isn't enough of a threat. So we'll enter a new world with legacy primes like BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin, the neoprimes building software-defined hardware, and then a subset of startups working on newer problems.

The nuance is whether we'll see a pan-European neoprime or a number of smaller, more national ones that cater to their individual markets. My bet is some middle ground. You'll probably have one that's German, one that caters to the Baltics and Ukraine, maybe one that's British and French. I don't see one neoprime addressing everything in Europe.

More generalist investors are entering the defense tech space. Is that good for the ecosystem?

It obviously drives up valuations, but at a meta level it's good news because there is so much work to be done. Re-industrializing and rearming Europe is a project that's going to take at least 10 years. We need all the capital we can get flowing into the ecosystem. Of course there will be winners and losers, and in some cases more capital will flow to lower quality companies that in a normal scenario wouldn't have raised money.

But the highest quality companies with the best teams and best products will still raise from defense-focused VCs like Expeditions because they understand the value of having a sector-specific investor at an early stage. Then more generalist investors are useful at a later stage because you need that capital to build the engine for growth.

How do you define deep tech?

For us, deep tech refers to technologies that are the outcome of breakthrough scientific discoveries. We see it as something that is really driven by science.

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