GALLOS Technologies, the defence venture studio chaired in part by former GCHQ director Sir Jeremy Fleming, has secured a $50m (£35m) balance-sheet investment co-led by Ventura Capital and Aberdeen Investments, with founding backer Lansdowne Partners following on. The round remains open to further strategic investors.
GALLOS was set up in 2021 by former national security official Josh Burch and armed forces veteran Dean Jones as a studio that both builds and backs defence, security and resilience companies. Rather than run a conventional fund, it holds its stakes on its own balance sheet — which is what the new capital is topping up.
The structure matters for the cap table. Because GALLOS invests from its own balance sheet rather than a closed-end vehicle, the $50m dilutes the studio's existing shareholders rather than sitting in a separate fund entity, and every position the studio takes in a new company is held directly by GALLOS itself.
Ventura Capital, an early Spotify backer, and Aberdeen Investments co-led the financing. Lansdowne Partners, the investment management firm that seeded the studio, participated again. Individual cheque sizes and the post-money valuation were not disclosed, and the round has not been formally closed — GALLOS said it is still open to a select group of additional strategic investors.
The studio's portfolio already includes StirlingX, a drone and data intelligence company where Jones serves as chief executive and Fleming is chairman, and AI Score, a data prevention business where Fleming advises and Burch sits as a non-executive director. That overlap of roles across the studio and its holdings is characteristic of the venture-studio model, where founding teams retain operating positions inside portfolio companies.
Fleming, who ran GCHQ between 2017 and 2023 and now chairs the GALLOS strategic advisory board, said the group's work strengthened the ability to protect people and businesses "in the UK and other allied nations", pointing to digital threats sharpened by geopolitical instability.
Mo El Husseiny, managing partner at Ventura Capital, described GALLOS as a platform for security, defence and resilience at a point when public and private buyers are demanding faster delivery.
The proceeds will fund the studio's next cohort of company creations and investments, plus spending on the shared platform it uses to stand new businesses up.
The raise lands in a UK defence-technology market that has absorbed a run of capital this year, from Cambridge Aerospace's $300m Series C at a $3.4bn valuation to Foresight Group's seed backing of sensing startup SpaceAM. For GALLOS, the test is whether a balance-sheet studio can generate exits at the pace a fund structure would demand — without the fixed ten-year clock that comes with one.
Original source: UKTN
