Onodrim's $300m Series A to buy up defence firms

I keep coming back to this one because a $300m Series A that is basically a buying fund with a tech pitch on top is not what I expect to see in the defence space, and it caught my eye straight away.

Onodrim Industries, based in Amsterdam, has raised $300m led by Lux Capital, with General Catalyst, Lakestar, Altimeter, Strike Capital, 137 Ventures and 8090 in the mix too, and the round values it at $1.3b. That comes after a $45m seed earlier this year, so a lot of money has landed in a short time for a company that hasn't yet announced a single acquisition.

The plan is to buy established businesses across aerospace and defence and industrial manufacturing, taking controlling stakes with permanent capital and then bringing in technology, operational and business development help to speed them up. They are going after dual-use companies in supply chains, services and products that sit at the bottleneck points for the European defence industry. It's a roll-up in spirit, though they would clearly rather you called it an industrial group, and the permanent capital bit is the part that separates it from a normal fund that has to sell in a few years.

The founders are Aistis Šimaitis, the CEO, who was an advisor to the Lithuanian Government and worked at Palantir, and Alexander Blessing, the CTO, who was a forward deployed engineer at Palantir, with Christian Garrett of 137 Ventures also a co-founder. They are opening offices in Munich and Turin to join the ones in Amsterdam, London and Vilnius, and first acquisitions are expected in the coming months.

What I would want to know next is who the first targets are and what kind of price a family-owned manufacturer gets when it sells to a company that has $300m to spend and a $1.3b valuation to justify.

Source: PR Newswire, Onodrim Industries secures $300 million Series A at $1.3 billion valuation to strengthen Europe's defence and industrial foundations