Up to 2024, the defence contractor lists of the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland held two start-ups between them. Not two each. Two in total, across three of Europe’s largest defence buyers. The figure comes from the Kiel Military Procurement Tracker, published in Bruegel’s policy brief on defence procurement reform in March 2026.
What has happened since is worth reading in order rather than in summary. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that Quantum Systems would supply the Bundeswehr with 520 Falke surveillance systems for €210 million. On 25 February 2026 the parliamentary budget committee approved contracts worth €268 million each to Stark Defence and Helsing for loitering munitions. On 22 April 2026 Rheinmetall signed a framework contract for its own loitering munition, a first call-off of €300 million against a ceiling reported at around €2.4 billion.
The door opened, and the incumbent came through it widest
Three start-ups won real orders from a buyer that had placed almost none with anyone like them. Then the hundred-year-old incumbent signed for more than all three put together. Both halves of that are true, and the European defence technology story as it is usually told stops after the first. Rheinmetall was not in the February tranche at all, having been slower to bring its own system forward. Four months later it signed the largest of the four agreements.
Bruegel’s analysis of the same procurement data shows the ten largest contractors taking between 67 and 90 per cent of military procurement in Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom. The equivalent American figure is under 40 per cent. Transaction costs and information asymmetries favour established procurement relationships, in the authors’ phrase, which is an unglamorous way of saying that a buyer who already knows a supplier has less work to do.
European instruments built to loosen that grip have not managed it. The European Defence Agency set a 35 per cent collaborative procurement benchmark in 2007. The 2022 coordinated annual review on defence put the achieved figure at 18 per cent, against a target set fifteen years earlier. Total EU defence expenditure reached €381 billion in 2025, and the defence readiness roadmap 2030 raises the ambition to 40 per cent by 2027. Those figures are from the European Parliamentary Research Service briefing of March 2026.
The seat is scoped above the country
Across 127 senior executives we have mapped in European defence and dual-use companies, 62 hold a commercial title. Twenty-six of those sit at chief level: fourteen chief commercial officers and nine chief revenue officers. The vocabulary is not what a sponsor’s brief usually reaches for. Roughly as many of these roles are titled around missions, capture, tenders or programmes as around sales or revenue. Almost all are scoped continentally, or with no territory at all.
The buying, on the evidence above, does not work that way. It happens inside national systems, through relationships that took years to build and sit with a specific authority. A title written across a continent and a sale won inside one ministry are describing different jobs, and the brief usually describes the first.
Two ways to fill it, and each is expensive somewhere different
Hire from inside a national defence environment and you get standing with the buying authority, which is the thing the procurement data says decides outcomes. What often comes with it is a career that has never had to produce a growth-investor board pack. Standing tends to sit in one of the systems the company sells into rather than in all of them. There may be no track record against a number a value creation plan can be built on. Reporting can be taught. Whether it can be taught quickly enough is a question about the fund’s patience rather than about the candidate.
Hire from a western European enterprise software background and the board pack arrives in the first month, along with the pipeline discipline and the language a sponsor can hold a quarterly against. Standing with the buyer starts at zero in every system. Where the ten largest suppliers take up to 90 per cent of the spend, zero is a more expensive place to start than it looks on a CV.
The answer is set by the asset
There isn’t a template answer here, and reaching for one is where this goes wrong. Both routes work and both cost something. Which cost a business can absorb depends on who it is actually selling to, and on whether anybody inside already holds the relationship that matters. It depends too on how many national systems the company genuinely has to win in, rather than how many appear in the plan. I take these one opportunity at a time and write the brief against the asset in front of me.
The version of that worth raising at the next investment committee is narrow. Establish which national buying authority the asset’s revenue depends on over the next three years, and whether the answer is one authority or four. A single-system asset and a four-system asset are not the same role, and a search run as though they were will fill one of them badly.
HMN Capital. Executive search and interim management for PE, venture and growth-backed businesses.
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