Onodrim and Europe’s Industrial Rearmament
€40M in seed funding signals a shift from defense spending to defense production.
Europe has debated strategic autonomy for years. The constraint has never been intent. It has been industrial capacity.
Defense budgets are rising across the continent, with nearly €800 billion projected by 2030. But sovereignty is not measured in appropriations. It is measured in production depth, supply chain resilience, and the ability to scale output under stress.
Onodrim Industries’ €40 million seed round should be understood in that context.
Headquartered in Amsterdam and backed by Founders Fund, Lakestar, and General Catalyst, Onodrim is not presenting itself as another defense software startup. It is positioning itself as infrastructure - spanning defense manufacturing, multi-domain sensing, and networked systems.
That framing is deliberate. Europe’s recent wave of defense innovation has skewed toward software and autonomy layers. Companies like Helsing have demonstrated that AI-native defense platforms can emerge from Europe. Hardware-focused firms such as Quantum Systems have shown that unmanned systems manufacturing can scale.
But software velocity and hardware ingenuity are not substitutes for industrial coherence.
The war in Ukraine exposed the structural weakness: Europe could finance support rapidly, but scaling ammunition production, replenishing stockpiles, and coordinating cross-border manufacturing proved slower and more fragmented than the geopolitical moment demanded.
Rearmament without synchronized production capacity risks becoming expenditure without leverage.
Onodrim’s founding thesis is that deterrence requires integration across three layers:
Defense-specific hardware
Systems-level software
Scalable manufacturing infrastructure
CEO Aistis Šimaitis, a former Lithuanian government advisor and Palantir technology leader, approaches this from a deterrence lens shaped by Eastern Europe’s security realities. For him, sovereignty is not rhetorical. It is operational. Peace depends on credible capacity.
CTO Alexander Blessing extends that logic into execution: Europe’s engineering talent is not the bottleneck. Converting talent into repeatable, cross-border production is.
This is where the company’s ambition becomes structural rather than incremental. Onodrim is attempting to operate beneath the application layer, reinforcing the connective tissue between design, production, and deployment inside Europe.
The participation of major American venture firms adds another dimension. Strategic autonomy does not require transatlantic decoupling. It requires reducing asymmetry within the alliance. A more industrially capable Europe strengthens NATO’s overall deterrent posture.
But capital alone will not solve Europe’s fragmentation. Procurement remains nationally segmented. Regulatory environments differ. Scaling manufacturing across jurisdictions is politically sensitive and capital-intensive.
€40 million is meaningful seed capital. It is not yet industrial transformation.
The real test for Onodrim, and for Europe’s emerging defense tech cohort, is whether venture-backed firms can embed themselves into procurement systems and build durable production capacity, not just compelling prototypes.
Europe’s rearmament will not be decided by how much it spends. It will be decided by whether it can produce, at speed, at scale, and across borders.
Onodrim’s raise is an early bet that the answer can be yes