The session’s core message is that defence and resilience technology is not a peripheral startup category but a founder-led response to concrete threats facing Ukraine, Israel and European democracies. Moderator Julian framed the discussion as a return to Bits & Pretzels’ founder-centric roots: understanding why founders choose hard problems, how they operate under pressure, and why defence, security and resilience differ from building “just another online shopping platform.” He introduced Marc Wietfeld of ARX Robotics, Johannes Schaback of STARK Defence and Ido as founders working in areas tied directly to democratic security and military capability.

Marc described ARX Robotics as a German defence scale-up focused on land forces, including ground drones and software digitisation for armed forces. Drawing on fourteen years in the German Armed Forces, semiconductor and construction experience, and exposure to military innovation units such as the Cyber Innovation Hub in Berlin and an innovation centre near Erding, he said ARX was created in 2022 and is working toward becoming a “neo prime”: not merely supplying individual technologies, but delivering end-to-end capabilities as a general contractor in four European countries and Ukraine. Johannes then presented STARK Defence as a company building AI weapons of war, primarily to support Ukraine and to help build European deterrence. He detailed a portfolio spanning autonomous aerial loitering munitions, maritime systems for surveying areas such as the Baltic Sea shadow fleet, and electronic warfare sensors and jammers connected into swarm-capable physical AI systems.

Ido introduced Skapion as a US-Israel counter-swarm company founded ten months earlier by defence-tech veterans, including Brigadier General Jung, who led early work on David’s Sling and Iron Dome at Rafael’s Air and Missile Defense Division. Skapion is developing a full-stack air defence approach for group one to three unmanned aerial system swarms, including Shaheds or Girons and later faster Guran four and five variants. He specified a new generation of interceptors priced at $10,000 per interceptor to the end customer, a modular multi-domain launcher, and software for threat analysis, interception and trajectories. He emphasized that countering a swarm is not the same as countering a single threat repeatedly.

The conversation then moved into origin stories. Johannes traced his decision to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the fear that Kyiv might fall, saying the crisis raised the personal question of whether one would run or fight. His work at SumUp brought the war even closer because much of the engineering team was in Ukraine and had relatives, neighbours or classmates harmed or killed. Ido described how his life split before and after 10/07/2023: while preparing to fly to AUSA in Washington, he cancelled the trip, put on uniform and left his family. That experience pushed him from being comfortable as an executive to feeling obliged to lead directly, both in uniform and in civilian life, especially as modern battlefields involve mass, scalable unmanned threats rather than only human adversaries.