Can you present Coalition Systems in a few words?

Coalition Systems is building Coalition OS, the shared coordination layer for the modern national security ecosystem. The problem we're solving is structural: military commands, intelligence services, government agencies, defense technology companies, allied forces, and critical infrastructure all operate on fragmented, siloed software stacks. At the seams between them, coordination collapses to consumer tools: Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram. Signalgate was not an anomaly. It was a symptom. The legacy infrastructure that does exist was built for a different era, siloed by institution and incapable of serving the expanded ecosystem that modern conflict demands. Coalition OS is purpose-built for secure communication, tasking, and AI-assisted decision support, built to the highest security standards that classified operational environments require, and designed to run across every device operators already carry — from personal hardware to official systems. We are building the railroad that allied defense runs on.

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How did you manage to secure a pre-seed investment from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z speedrun fund?

I was pursuing a PhD in Engineering at Oxford, having studied politics, foreign policy, and defence at Yale — and that intersection gave me an unusual vantage point. I could see both the technical gap and the geopolitical stakes clearly, and I had the conviction to act on it. The Andreessen Horowitz speedrun team was genuinely excited — about the thesis, about the timing, and about the team behind it. The demand for stronger defence capabilities is accelerating globally, budgets are expanding, and a new generation of defence technology companies is emerging alongside traditional institutions. We were building the coordination infrastructure that the entire national security ecosystem was missing — and combined with the team we've put together, I think that's what made it compelling.

“We are building the railroad that allied defense runs on.”

Which risks and opportunities do you identify for Europe’s Defence in general and for Coalition Systems in particular?

The opportunity for Europe is also the urgency. For the first time in a generation, the continent is investing seriously in its own defence capabilities. Rearm Europe and rising NATO commitments have created political will and budget that simply did not exist two years ago. There is a lot of noise right now about the state of the transatlantic alliance. My view is that what we are seeing is a blip. The alliance is deep, structural, and built on decades of shared interest — it has endured far more than the current moment and it will endure this. The real question is whether allied nations will have the software infrastructure to coordinate effectively when it matters. That is what Coalition Systems is building. We have feedback loops with key actors across the board, from NATO to the Royal Navy to the US Pentagon, and the appetite is there.

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