NATO Innovation Fund chair Fiona Murray: ‘The threat from Russia is extremely real’

When NATO announced plans to launch a €1bn innovation fund back in 2022, heads turned. €1bn? To invest in defence and security? Backed by 24 countries? At the time, most European VCs were still incredibly wary of backing defence companies — and nothing like this had ever been attempted before.

Three years on, host Amy Lewin is joined on the Sifted Podcast by Dame Fiona Murray, current chair and former vice-chair of the Nato Innovation Fund (NIF), to take stock of how the experiment is playing out.

Since becoming operational in 2023, the fund has faced significant scrutiny. Four of its original founding partners have left, one of them pursuing legal action over a compensation dispute, while former chair Klaus Hommels stepped into a new role last September following questions around potential conflicts of interest.

Amy and Fiona discuss these controversies, as well as what the fund is actively looking to invest in today, the structural challenges facing Europe’s defence tech startups and what still needs to change if European nations are to build long-term technological resilience in an increasingly unstable world.