Europe is waking as much as the necessity to spend money on protection, and so are European VCs. However with a painful historical past of Soviet occupations, Lithuania didn’t await the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to succeed in its third anniversary to commit 5% to 6% 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 have been the primary within the area [to be] totally approved to do protection investments again in March 2023,” mentioned Viktorija Trimbel, its managing companion since February 2023.
Not like many Lithuanians, Trimbel will not be tall in any respect. However 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,” acquired Coinvest’s largest funding in that area, however it’s not the one one. In response to Trimbel, the evergreen fund has invested some €6.8 million (roughly $7.37 million) into aerospace, protection, and dual-use startups since 2023.
In comparison with the billion-dollar rounds flooding into U.S. protection tech corporations, the quantity might not sound very spectacular. That’s except you take into account 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 structure that Trimbel is especially captivated with.
As a board member of the Lithuanian Enterprise Angel Community (LitBAN), which now has 324 members, she’s notably eager to see extra good cash stream into the market. Whereas the collective worth of Lithuania’s startup ecosystem increased 39 times in 10 years, the nation nonetheless lacks an exit as impactful as Skype’s was for Estonia.
Nonetheless, liquidity occasions resembling 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 imagine that was one of many elements which facilitated an explosive development of the enterprise angel ecosystem,” Trimbel mentioned.
In protection tech, too, Trimbel champions the success of others in securing capital. Coinvest’s sole restricted companion, Lithuania’s nationwide growth financial institution, additionally supplied “main capital injections to different native VCs like BSV Ventures or ScaleWolf, together with [the] Lithuanian contribution to the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF),” she celebrated on LinkedIn.
Equally, Trimbel is pleased to see governments throughout Europe embracing the pattern of “investing in deterrence and protection to additional help competitiveness and resilience of European international locations.”
That’s a necessity Lithuania is sorely conscious of, usually deeply personally. “Once I was 18, I noticed with my very own eyes, Russian tanks killing individuals. So for us, it’s not a textbook story,” Trimbel mentioned, referring to the 1991’s January Events through 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 one thing that each household has skilled a technique or one other: occupation, deportations, killings. We don’t must be taught why we have to spend money on protection,” Trimbel mentioned.
Nonetheless, 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 more than €5.6 million for drones and anti-drone techniques, together with from UDS. Trimbel endorsed it, urging, “Help Ukraine NOW … and every other day until victory.”
Like almost all Lithuanians, Trimbel remembers the place she was when Russia launched its full-on invasion of its jap neighbor on February 24, 2022. Just a few days earlier, she was overseas together with her two daughters, they usually mentioned whether or not they need to return as indicators of struggle amounted — till her youngest daughter identified that they needed to: They’d left the cat.
Cat or no cat, Trimbel would seemingly have returned to Lithuania both manner. 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: “As an alternative of going to the bar and discussing a brand new purse or a costume or lipstick, we go to the taking pictures vary,” she mentioned with a smile.
After all, not everybody reacts the identical manner — it’s solely human to expertise a flight or freeze reflex. Within the quick aftermath of the struggle, nevertheless, she aimed to get others out of this paralysis by encouraging them to take sensible steps. One in every of them was to hitch volunteering initiatives which have gained steam throughout Lithuania.
Probably the most emblematic group in that discipline is the government-backed nonprofit Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (LRU). Whereas it’s devoted to the protection and strengthening of Lithuania, its actions prolong past army coaching: Along with Coinvest and others, it co-organized the Fire Shield hackathon, which is able to return in 2025 for a 3rd version.
That’s the context through 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 country despatched to help 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 ventilation protection project. “COVID was a superb rehearsal to mobilize society throughout instances of menace,” she mentioned. For her, that menace has now modified, however it is rather a lot actual.
However even now, Trimbel cares about areas aside from protection tech, and so does Coinvest. She spoke enthusiastically of portfolio startup Walk15 and its upcoming “Labrador walk,” an open air hike with canines to encourage individuals to take extra steps to be extra energetic — actually.
Nonetheless, as she wrote in a latest LinkedIn post, “no different funding returns will matter if Ukraine won’t obtain ample help from allies and Europe will likely be invaded additional.” As her identify and persona recommend, she received’t relent in her efforts to stop this consequence.
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