An AI firm focused on defence has been launched from stealth by the founder of a celebrated unicorn and an ex-British Army leader.
Agon, which has bases in London and Berlin, has raised $30 million (£22.5m) seed investment to build Europe’s sovereign defence AI infrastructure – one of largest early stage defence technology investments of 2026.
CEO Tristam Constant (pictured right) founded the startup with Junaid Hussain (left), founder of defence unicorn Cambridge Aerospace and Google-backed AI and gaming company Iconic. Hussain was previously a partner at Kingsway Capital.
After spending 13 years in leadership positions across the British Army, Constant served as head of European defence at Applied Intuition and was senior director of Europe at Anduril Industries.
The firm is chaired by David Helgason, the founder and former CEO of Unity Technologies, one of the world’s leading software development technology and game engine companies. He stepped down from his roles at Unity in February this year.
Recent conflicts have shown the decisiveness of AI and autonomous systems on the battlefield. With significant government investment across European defence, the political will to build sovereign defence AI capability has never been stronger.
Defence organisations worldwide are spending hundreds of billions building autonomous weapon systems – drones, interceptors, and intelligent munitions, but the critical infrastructure to train, validate, and evolve the AI that controls them does not exist.
Agon’s platform is described as the synthetic battle arena where autonomous weapon systems learn to fight – trained at machine speed against realistic, adaptive adversaries drawn from live conflict intelligence, at a scale and fidelity that the real world cannot provide.
It offers defence companies, AI developers, and government evaluators the ability to rapidly and rigorously optimise autonomous capability. It will compress development cycles, reduce dependence on live trials, and deliver reproducible evidence for procurement of new systems.
The company says it has already developed capability with early design partners and signed initial partnerships with operationally proven European defence autonomy companies.
It was first hatched with $7m in founding pre-seed investment from Lakestar, 201 Ventures, D3, and angels including Helgason. This was followed by a $23m seed round with XYZ, Lux Capital and Northzone, with existing investors doubling down significantly and Lakestar’s Klaus Hommels joining the company’s board of directors.
“We have spent the last six months quietly building, partnering with operationally proven platform builders and assembling a world-class team,” said Constant.
“We are in an AI arms race – Agon is developing the infrastructure that will ensure European defence can iterate and orchestrate systems at the pace of the threat.”
Hussain added: “Our launch today reflects the critical need for Europe to establish its own sovereign defence AI capability and the significant investor confidence in what we are building.
“With this investment we will now scale and iterate our platform for European end users.”