On how two military veterans are building dual-use software to revolutionise operations in high-stakes environments
As an Estonian, coming from a country on NATO’s Eastern flank, you naturally think a lot about defence and national resilience. And as an Estonian investor, it follows that you see a lot of defence tech companies.
But a lot of the investment into this sector is becoming crowded, around hundreds of emerging companies building better drones or better kinetic targeting, with the majority of defence capital set to go into developing better hardware and equipment.
There is no argument that plenty of smart hardware is important for both deterrence and also winning a war like our friends in Ukraine need to right now. But if you think of it — most modern military technology is used about 1% of the time in kinetic scenarios and sits idle for most of the day, except for an occasional training use. (Luckily!)
London-based startup Labrys is a rare type of defence tech company building a product that is useful for that other 99% of the time. Labrys’ Axiom is a software platform designed to coordinate global security teams, civilian and defence networks that have to be persistently engaged everywhere, and all the time, both in times of peace and conflict.
Some call this total defence. In today’s unstable world, militaries work in close and constant collaboration with civilian agencies, humanitarian groups, as well as regular citizens who provide logistical support and real-time intelligence. A new era of civil and defence integration has emerged, but the tech stack to support a truly scalable mobilisation model to defend our democracies is not yet fully defined, let alone built.
Only real life experiences like Labrys team’s past of running military, humanitarian and logistics scenarios in some of the most hazardous environments can inform how this trust infrastructure is built. They have now built a product that allows these high stakes operations to be coordinated seamlessly and securely, making operations more efficient and safer for the good guys.
Labrys’ solution is already being employed to coordinate mission critical teams all over the world, including in Ukraine. Labrys, has already signed contracts as a new Prime with the UK Government and begun working with other NATO nations, while proving the product has valuable civilian applications too.
The problem to solve
The era where only men in uniform would be responsible for managing a security operation is over. Global operations are defined increasingly by the close integration between different partners, across different networks, and across different degrees of trust.
Currently, the military systems to support this kind of coordination are closed, clunky and not built for broad collaboration with trusted, but external networks. As a result, even militaries use consumer apps like Signal or Telegram to communicate with people in the field, and have to pay them by distributing cash via channels that impose compliance and technical risks.
This creates a number of problems around trust.
Owing to the lack of available tools for this type of collaboration, single purpose (encrypted) chat applications are being used as a stop gap, but were fundamentally never designed to solve the trust problems associated with dealing with and coordinating a global network of people and data. Whether it’s verifying the location of a photo submitted by a team member on the ground, authenticating the identity of your team member in a foreign country, or evidencing that $10,000 USD has reached the wallet of the right person completing the right task at the right time, you start to run into real problems when doing this at any scale using email, closed HF/radio systems, WhatsApp or Signal.
Creating trust
Labrys’s platform uses biometrics and identity verification to give users more trust that they’re dealing with reliable people, while its inbuilt media validation means that decision makers know exactly where and when photos or videos have been taken.
Labrys uses crypto rails to pay people reliably with stablecoins upon completion of a task, meaning the money goes directly into a secure digital wallet that they can then withdraw from at a local shop.
The company’s platform also makes collaboration between different allied militaries faster and smoother.
Armed forces naturally possess secure communication tools that work well, but Labrys founders Gus and Luke saw during their service time how — when allied countries begin cooperating on a joint exercise or mission — it can often take as long as a couple of days to get these encrypted comms systems working together. When they use Labrys, different users from all sectors and walks of life can quickly begin operating together, using a modern communication interface overlaid over satellite imagery showing the environment they’re operating in with an intuitive UX.
Other use cases
Labrys’s military-grade, encrypted command and control software creates a trustworthy distributed network of individuals operating in challenging environments. And while the company is targeting military use cases first, there are civilian applications too.
Humanitarian organisations working in situations like disaster relief tend to use a chaotic system of WhatsApp groups to coordinate jobs that need to be done. Labrys’s task management tooling lets coordinators upload tasks with location information, and when an individual accepts it, it’s removed from the feed, stopping potential confusion over duplicated work — useful both in conflict zones and humanitarian situations.
The company is seeing demand from large media organisations too. Currently, newsrooms devote whole teams and hundreds of hours to verifying open source intelligence to help them report news events, e.g,. images shared on WhatsApp groups of a building that’s been bombed.
Labrys’s geolocated photo sharing capability allows journalistic, humanitarian, and government teams to combat misinformation and access accurate intelligence faster — a valuable product in a world where deep fakes and hostile state-coordinated information manipulation are on the rise.
The right team and matching investors
Labrys’s founders are building a product based on deep knowledge of a real problem to solve.
CEO Gus spent more than four years as a commando in the British Royal Marines, and a further five years in the UK government’s Stabilisation Unit which aims to support fragile states and prevent conflicts. COO Luke served more than 18 years in the British Army.
(The founders photo you wish you had as a poster…)
These founders clearly know all about grit and resilience, but still, this is their first technology company to build. That’s where Plural comes in, and it’s precisely one of the main reasons we exist: to support European experts in their field, bringing scar tissue from our own operational experience to give our entrepreneurs the support they need to develop great products, scale teams and successfully go to market.
The startup also presents remarkable levels of crossover with my own passions for a while.
I spent eight years in product and management roles at Skype, building a communication tool based on secure, decentralised methods — a core part of Labrys’s vision too. I’ve also been in crypto for more than a decade, investing in companies developing the stablecoin and blockchain technologies that Labrys is using for its payments system.
European impact
The VC world has become understandably enthusiastic about defence tech in recent months — and in a more unstable world it’s never been more important to invest in our capabilities to protect the democratic world.
But companies like Labrys are rare in the space — bringing decades of experience in the armed forces into a product that militaries really need on a daily basis, with genuine dual use applications for civilian markets. The tech has already been used to help facilitate the evacuation of persecuted minorities in Afghanistan, as well as being used by the Ukrainian State Emergency Services during the Kakhovka Dam breach.
European governments are urgently investing in making the continent’s defence sector fit for the modern age — underscored by Ursula Von Der Lyen’s plan to unlock €800bn to rearm the bloc.
I believe Labrys’s Axiom software platform will become the operating system to coordinate the people defending us, creating a safer and stronger Europe. That’s exactly the kind of impact we like to invest in at Plural.