Europe is waking as much as the necessity to put money into protection, and so are European VCs. But with a painful historical past of Soviet occupations, Lithuania didn’t look ahead to the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to achieve its third anniversary to commit 5% to six% of its GDP to army spending — and fund protection startups.
Lithuania’s sovereign VC fund Coinvest Capital was a pioneer in that regard, and it nonetheless is an outlier in not requiring civilian use instances. “We were the first in the region [to be] fully authorized to do defense investments back in March 2023,” stated Viktorija Trimbel, its managing companion since February 2023.
Unlike many Lithuanians, Trimbel will not be tall in any respect. But what she lacks in basketball potential, she makes up for in vitality and relentlessness, particularly in relation to advocating for innovation in protection tech to strengthen Europe’s safety.
Unmanned Defense Systems (UDS), a Vilnius-based firm centered on optimizing the “kill chain,” obtained Coinvest’s largest funding in that area, however it’s not the one one. According to Trimbel, the evergreen fund has invested some €6.8 million (roughly $7.37 million) into aerospace, protection, and dual-use startups since 2023.
Compared to the billion-dollar rounds flooding into U.S. protection tech firms, the quantity might not sound very spectacular. That’s except you contemplate it per capita, one thing individuals usually urge you to do on this small Baltic nation of two.89 million inhabitants.
Co-creation is one other notion that Lithuania usually emphasizes, as does Coinvest. As its identify suggests, the early-stage fund is co-investing into startups with enterprise angels and different VCs. For early-stage offers, it adopted a capped profit-sharing construction that Trimbel is especially captivated with.
As a board member of the Lithuanian Business Angel Network (LitBAN), which now has 324 members, she’s notably eager to see extra good cash movement into the market. While the collective worth of Lithuania’s startup ecosystem elevated 39 instances in 10 years, the nation nonetheless lacks an exit as impactful as Skype’s was for Estonia.
Still, liquidity occasions comparable to Vinted’s secondary sale had a drip-down impact, and Trimbel thinks Coinvest can multiply these euros quick. When it exited Interactio after simply 18 months, its guidelines boosted angel buyers’ returns from 9x to 34x. “I believe that was one of the factors which facilitated an explosive growth of the business angel ecosystem,” Trimbel stated.
In protection tech, too, Trimbel champions the success of others in securing capital. Coinvest’s sole restricted companion, Lithuania’s nationwide improvement financial institution, additionally offered “major capital injections to other local VCs like BSV Ventures or ScaleWolf, including [the] Lithuanian contribution to the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF),” she celebrated on LinkedIn.
Similarly, Trimbel is happy to see governments throughout Europe embracing the pattern of “investing in deterrence and defense to further support competitiveness and resilience of European countries.”
That’s a necessity Lithuania is sorely conscious of, usually deeply personally. “When I was 18, I saw with my own eyes, Russian tanks killing people. So for us, it’s not a textbook story,” Trimbel stated, referring to the 1991’s January Events by which the Soviet army tried to suppress Lithuania’s independence motion.
The trauma of Soviet rule that’s deeply ingrained in Lithuania’s collective reminiscence stretches far past 1991. “It’s something that every family has experienced one way or another: occupation, deportations, killings. We don’t need to be taught why we need to invest in defense,” Trimbel stated.
Still, for the reason that struggle in Ukraine, there’s a renewed sense of urgency and solidarity. The 2025 version of Radarom, a public fundraising marketing campaign for Ukraine, collected greater than €5.6 million for drones and anti-drone techniques, together with from UDS. Trimbel endorsed it, urging, “Support Ukraine NOW … and any other day till victory.”
Like almost all Lithuanians, Trimbel recollects the place she was when Russia launched its full-on invasion of its japanese neighbor on February 24, 2022. Just a few days earlier, she was overseas together with her two daughters, and so they mentioned whether or not they need to return as indicators of struggle amounted — till her youngest daughter identified that they needed to: They had left the cat.
Cat or no cat, Trimbel would possible have returned to Lithuania both means. She factors out that her first identify, Viktorija, or Victory, is an efficient match for her relentless persona. Her circle of girlfriends can be as much as par: “Instead of going to the bar and discussing a new handbag or a dress or lipstick, we go to the shooting range,” she stated with a smile.
Of course, not everybody reacts the identical means — it’s solely human to expertise a flight or freeze reflex. In the quick aftermath of the struggle, nevertheless, she aimed to get others out of this paralysis by encouraging them to take sensible steps. One of them was to hitch volunteering initiatives which have gained steam throughout Lithuania.
The most emblematic group in that subject is the government-backed nonprofit Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (LRU). While it’s devoted to the protection and strengthening of Lithuania, its actions lengthen past army coaching: Together with Coinvest and others, it co-organized the Fire Shield hackathon, which can return in 2025 for a 3rd version.
That’s the context by which Trimbel is pictured above, along with the Union’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Linas Idzelis (in uniform) and retired Lt. Col. Valerijus Šerelis, former squadron commander of the particular operations forces that the not-that-random nation despatched to assist NATO allies in Afghanistan after 9/11.
LRU additionally contributed to civilian response in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as did Trimbel, who invested efforts right into a helmet-based air flow safety venture. “COVID was a good rehearsal to mobilize society during times of threat,” she stated. For her, that risk has now modified, however it is extremely a lot actual.
But even now, Trimbel cares about areas apart from protection tech, and so does Coinvest. She spoke enthusiastically of portfolio startup Walk15 and its upcoming “Labrador walk,” an outdoor hike with canine to encourage individuals to take extra steps to be extra energetic — actually.
However, as she wrote in a current LinkedIn publish, “no other investment returns will matter if Ukraine will not receive sufficient support from allies and Europe will be invaded further.” As her identify and persona recommend, she gained’t relent in her efforts to stop this end result.