The Venture Codex

Led · Equity · Aug 2026

Gallos operates a model that both builds new ventures and provides capital to early-stage companies focused on defense, security and resilience. The firm is led by founders with security and defense backgrounds, including ex-UK national security official Josh Burch and Royal Marines veteran Dean Jones. Its portfolio includes StirlingX, which works on unmanned aerial vehicles and data intelligence, and AI Score, which focuses on compliance, governance and optimization of enterprise AI systems. Gallos’s team and advisors include former senior intelligence and cybersecurity figures such as Sir Jeremy Fleming, former head of GCHQ, along with former GCHQ Technology Director Gaven Smith and former NSA technology executive Greg Smithberger. The company plans to use newly raised capital to create additional companies, support portfolio investments and enhance its platform.

Led · Series A · Jul 2026

StirlingX develops a sovereign intelligence and autonomy platform that captures, secures, fuses, analyses and enables action on data from complex and contested environments; it is publicly described as a data intelligence provider "disguised as a drone company." The company serves defence and critical national infrastructure customers with use cases including surveying, mapping, monitoring infrastructure and detecting and countering hostile drones. StirlingX is chaired by the former Director of GCHQ and led by CEO and founder Dean Jones. It recently raised an $11 million Seed round and has just closed a $20 million Series A to accelerate product development and international expansion. The company cites traction with partners across Five Eyes and defence ministries and agencies and intends to scale with new and existing partners to support complex missions.

Participated · Series D · Feb 2026

Allica Bank is a fintech challenger bank purpose-built for established SMEs with 5–250 employees, combining bespoke modern technology with dedicated human relationship managers. Its product suite spans business current accounts, lending solutions, and savings offerings tailored to the needs of growing companies. The bank currently serves more than 30,000 UK businesses, representing roughly 5% of its addressable market, and aims to double that share to 10% by 2028. Management plans to deepen technology investment, scale marketing, and enhance product features to drive domestic growth. With fresh capital, Allica also intends to explore international expansion opportunities. The Series D round values the company at $1.2 billion, underscoring investor confidence in its growth trajectory and business model.

Led · Series B · Feb 2026

ManageMy is an Intelligent Orchestration Platform built to streamline how insurers sell, service, underwrite, and manage policies across life, health, and P&C lines. Its modular, no-code system unifies customer experience, automated underwriting, and intelligent claims decisioning into a single ‘deep front-end’ layer. The company’s technology is already used by more than 45 major insurance carriers and broker groups, demonstrating growing commercial traction as an alternative to legacy portals and point solutions. Recent product priorities include expanding AI capabilities such as agentic workflows, explainable decisioning, and data-driven underwriting automation. ManageMy plans to use new capital to deepen product features, scale go-to-market teams, and strengthen its presence in North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. Co-founded by Stephen Collins, Sean O'Connor, Gino Maccio, and Sean Rowley, the UK-registered company maintains global headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina and London. Financial details beyond fundraising totals were not disclosed, but the firm cites a durable, high-quality recurring-revenue model.

Led · Equity · May 2025

Tekever builds AI-enabled, full‑stack unmanned aerial systems including the AR3 and AR5 drones and integrates avionics, propulsion, sensors, software and autonomy. The company has extensive operational experience in Ukraine, with its AR3 logging over 10,000 operational flight hours and its systems implicated in destroying more than £3B in Russian assets. Tekever has iterated its platforms through over 100 field updates across materials, propulsion, communications, sensors and AI based on frontline feedback. It plans to scale UK manufacturing, expand testing facilities, and establish Centres of Excellence for Autonomy to unite academia, startups and defence partners. The firm aims to create more than 1,000 skilled UK jobs and to anchor a European alternative to traditional defence primes through the OVERMATCH programme. A recent funding round has pushed Tekever’s valuation past the £1B mark and will support rapid production, testing and deployment of its sovereign defence capabilities. Tekever is a dual-use drone company founded in Portugal that also operates in the U.K. and France, developing surveillance and command drone platforms. It controls all aspects of its products—airframe design and manufacturing, payloads, avionics, software, data and AI—allowing rapid adaptation to customer needs and changing battlefield requirements. Its largest platform, the ARX, can command multiple smaller drones for land, sea or battlefield surveillance, and its systems have been deployed in Ukraine, by the European Maritime Safety Agency, and the U.K. Home Office. The company says it will use the €70M funding to develop its product and expand into new markets, specifically the U.S. Tekever bootstrapped before raising a €20M Series A in 2022 from Ventura Capital and Iberis Capital. It is not disclosing a valuation for the latest round. Tekever develops drones with integrated AI, sensors and communications tailored to monitor and detect activity on bodies of water, and sells both hardware components and drone-based surveillance services branded Atlas. The company combines edge AI, satellite communications and cloud computing to deliver near‑real‑time intelligence and predictive analytics for customers. Its drones have wingspans from about two to eight meters and flight times up to 20 hours; Tekever most commonly operates its own fleet and offers intelligence‑as‑a‑service. Customers include government agencies such as the European Maritime Safety Agency and the U.K. Home Office, as well as private shipping firms and smaller nations. Tekever was founded in 2001 and is based in Lisbon, Portugal; it began commercial services in 2018 and has been profitable for some time. The company says it expects to grow at a 60% CAGR over the next three years and plans to use new funding to hire staff and further build out its technology, including work on submarine activity detection and oil‑spill classification.