Max Buchan, CEO of Valarian: BREAKING: Valarian raised $50m Series A

0:00Max Buchan:Hello, welcome back to Skating Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I'm joined by Max. Max, founder and CEO of Valerian. With some amazing news today. What's going on? Hey, thanks for having me back, by the way. We bumped into each other in the street a couple of months ago after our Philz podcast. So now it's great to see you again, man. yeah dude it's it's great it's great we just did a uh 50 million series a uh which you know about led by nea um really cool it's their first dual purpose slash defense investment in europe which is really really cool man so i'm lucky to work with someone really great there uh called mustafa and um and yeah it's been fun man we're just growing the team massively we're doubling down our uk presence all good stuff and i think the seed was it last may that you announced it and that was a 20 million dollar seed you've now got 50 million series eight just over a year later what's happened in the last year mate well absolutely it's it's so is that it's gone absolutely wild now the to be to be i can't remember the rock star that said this but there was this that rock star that said it took me 10 years to have an overnight success that's very much how i feel about this right like to be clear this is an unbelievably um like complex sophisticated product to build from like a virtualized infrastructure perspective which we can talk about in a second but like yeah you're right we kind of concluded the seed um you know uh beginning of last year and we we brought a product to market in production we'd spent a lot of time building it and from there kind of like revenue really exploded um you know we so we we launched our first kind of infrastructure product acro which basically as you know kind of compartmentalizes above the compute layer how you run critical systems like ai especially open weighted models kind of isolating what data they can interact with um finally got that in production and it just went crazy man i mean in q like our first quarter for instance i think we signed about 43 million in total contract value in q1 wow yeah and obviously i do tcv not error because it is blended between defense and stuff um and i will do about 100 million this year so for our first you know our first out of the gate i'm really proud of the team that's insane wow all right so So maybe for those who don't know about what you're building, can you give a quick one minute, two minute overview of kind of what you've built today?

2:11Yeah, absolutely. So we build a product called Acra, which is a digital infrastructure product. And I like to think of it as a secure walled garden. So essentially it sits above the compute and it can be anything from public cloud to private cloud to hybrid, gov cloud, you know, on prem at the edge. we sit above the compute layer and what we do is allow the ability to run very sensitive systems on any kind of compute so if you want to run a very sensitive workload on a public cloud or between azure gcp and you know aws whatever it is um acra is like an abstraction layer to allow you to run those models critical systems communication systems all that all that kind of

2:49Max Buchan:stuff and you've got two key tracks right enterprise and defense can you talk a bit about the difference in those two tracks yeah i mean it's interesting so we don't we don't really like um follow a concept of ftes or anything in fact like we have a ubiquitous product right which is agra it just it services quite different markets um but the great thing is like some of our super early deployments especially tests were in the kind of defense arena um and i felt like the legitimacy that gave us because we were being tested by some pretty pointy organizations the legitimization of that our enterprise business is growing like almost exponentially right now which is awesome um and we're kind of just really applying the same you know the same thesis um so it's a ubiquitous product it just kind of has um you know slightly different gtms in that aspect yeah it's really interesting so you say you sign the hardest possible customers to sign first and then after that i get like enterprise probably seems relatively easy compared to defense organizations well you know i think i think maybe i i actually underappreciated the time that that that would have that effect you know which is the kind of more the legitimization aspect which is like oh it actually works here it's probably going to work in the bank you know um you know very robustly and also because you know obviously in defense and national security we think a lot about segmenting data uh based on classification right and thinking through how that would work and compartmentalizing and isolating systems from that framework but of course, it works exactly the same with regulated data, whether you're an airline or a bank or a healthcare company, it's really, really similar.

4:20And especially in this kind of age of, frankly, people are getting, our customers are these, they're getting very nervous about giving all of their data to frontier model labs. You know, they are in a position where they're like, hey, a lot of things in life are becoming commoditized, all my intellectual property, all this stuff, I really want to control what a frontier model lab has access to. And so we think a lot about how do we build the zero trust operating environment to run largely open-weighted models, but also a lot of other stuff within those environments.

4:50Max Buchan:What are those organized, like, you know, a lot of the narrative around Valerian is around sovereign infrastructure. We've seen this big moment in sovereignty. Is that the concern when you talk to these companies? Is it, are they worried about being sovereign or is it something else? Are they worried about something else about the LLMs having their data? What specifically are their big concerns? Yeah, I mean, look, it's a great question. And it slightly depends on the market, slightly depends on the company. And don't get me wrong, we have definitely seen the geopolitical inflection point that the world's in, whether it was the shying off of the anthropic model, whether it was the whole Greenland debacle back in Q1, that we are obviously going through a massive inflection point.

5:30And that has been a huge thing for us. Actually, being a British company is being extremely helpful to do that. One thing I would say on the sovereignty piece as well, Seb, is like it gets bandied about a lot. For me, sovereignty just means control and optionality. So, you know, I've got different options for doing what I want to do and I can control the system. And I think for me, fundamentally, that's what comes down to my fundamental view on like Europe, I guess, writ large, when we're thinking about these problems, it's like, where can we do really well and build best in the world products instead of just thinking, how do we rebuild everything?

6:04Like, you know, have my own X, have my own Y. So that's how we about valerian is like how could we build an abstraction that stays sovereign regardless of compute etc um so i would say specifically in europe definitely in the middle east it's about sovereignty keeping control but a lot of our growing customer base is actually in the us and that's about like i actually get a bit nervous about you know it's somewhat a world customers like i get nervous thinking sam altman might have access to my data certainly the other day so like you know obviously that argument in the us is very much not like predicated on government it's predicated on on the idea of ai and who controls it that's super interesting okay

6:38Max Buchan:so yeah what where where's most of the growth coming from then you're seeing this explosion it sounds like enterprise is doing really really well how does that look across europe middle east us at the moment yeah and i so i think one of the things i'm proudest of is our gtm this year i think was really good and i you know give mad props to my co-founder josh who's amazing i don't who think you you met briefly said but you know um you know he was there he was in the army for a long time in the u.s and then he spent i think about 12 years uh planted but he was really good at constructing a go-to market that was split between three facets actually not two so we were thinking about this it's like b2b for sure there's b2g but then also b2b2g which is basically like how how can we embed kind of sovereign infra into a stack of folks selling into governments so rather than just us always going we have knock on the door and what kind of governance the b2b2g play which is let's be part of this sovereign stack whereby we are going to service an abstraction layer that's going to sit above something else that's already being sold into a contract and so i would say that indirect piece um was a huge hockey stick for us in the revenue growth that's so interesting yeah you based on a sense of sort of building your own layer in that huge growing market exactly yeah let's talk about the round then so 50 million that's a lot of money from NEA who are some amazing US investors where did this round come from you know was this see were they seeing the work that you were doing in the US was this yeah like tell me about where it came from yeah so we originally met through a partner of ours who we absolutely love called Second Front who are you know US DC based um yeah unicorn just amazing amazing folks and NEA had led one of their earlier rounds um and yeah man we just we got to know them super well over frankly quite a long time so the last 14 15 months just after we closed that other round um honestly just really great people but i would say that mustafa um was so acutely aware of you know not just what was happening in defense but also in like geopolitically in the world he was spending a ton of time in europe and so i think they were hyper aware of this kind of that this kind of piece but then also i think for me um it was more of an idea of like you remember wiz the cyber security company one of the best things that they did obviously um you know it might have changed since the acquisition by google but one of the things they did super well was be agnostic to cloud right that that enabled a huge um a huge growth spurt and it was kind of similar for us us not being locked into a specific compute provider and us being an abstraction above them because none of our customers run a single cloud environment like none of them do none of them have gone all in on aws because it'd be really silly so from a resilience aspect they're running those clouds and how do we provide that secure sovereign layer as we call it above that so i I think they were big fans of us being fairly agnostic in this world that's changing.

9:24We've got Nebius now in Europe, which is awesome. CoreWeave in the US, we've got all these NeoClouds, etc. So I think that was one of the things that got them excited.

9:33Max Buchan:And I saw in the press release there was commentary from Kanishka here in the UK. There's a lot of talk about UK sovereignty, the hardware plan. How important was you to have somebody like Kanishka be involved or at least supportive of the round, supportive of the company? And how impactful or helpful have the UK government been at all? Well, Kanishka's awesome, by the way. He's just a fantastic guy. And I absolutely love all the things he's working toward in the UK ecosystem. I would say, look, we've been quite close with Gov the last few months for multiple reasons, both on the defensive side, but also more generally.

10:10And it's been really cool. In fact, we actually met one of our investors that we're about to announce. may or may not have been in the press release set but um nikesh aurora who is the ceo palo ato networks um just invested a very large angel ticket into flaring which is really gazing as he seeks the entire market i met him um in number 10 which is really cool so like fostering this ecosystem um it is it's really really awesome and so yeah obviously we're reading a lot about burnham and what's to come and stuff and and kind of really you know i have been quite optimistic as well about some of the stuff we've been reading recently yeah i think

10:45Max Buchan:the government the current government is unlike an amazing work and i think it's so rare that so much of the uk techie system is behind a politician but like kedishki really has had that impact of like people really like it yeah i mean he's great i mean he really gets it like he's extremely like um um technologically aware of like the entire market and what's happening and also whether uk can have a place because i mean we were super behind a couple of years ago right we were like scary behind and then as you said subjects before we started there's like the proliferation of this kind of like london maxing like it like idea that you know i think sometimes it's like a cultural optimism piece it's like once you start the flywheel spinning if you actually can build stuff here it's quite infectious because then people are like well why can't i i do it and you know let's kind of give it a go and i think kineshka's um optimism i think is really really helpful yeah it's pretty a big role um well let's look forward we've just raised 50 million well capitalized things are going well what is it that you want to achieve in the next six 12 months so i i feel very strongly about proving that we can build a world-class company i think the the the thing with the idea of sovereignty sometimes is it company it can come across as like oh you just gotta buy it because it's because it's here but like fundamentally we just want to be the best in the world at what we do now the fact that we're british is great and i really love that but like valerian is now deployed across four continents and i'm more proud of that it's like really cool being here but like knowing how how ubiquitous that's becoming is just sick for me for me at least that's what i'm i'm most proud of so the next six to nine months like to be clear like we are we're slightly um bursting the seams just in terms of like deployment grade so our my main focus right now is hiring engineers um building that team um gcm team as you know most most of our engineering team came from dark trace because our chairman was the co-founder of Dark Jays.

12:34So we had a few touch points there. But yeah, man, just massively expanding the team is the plan. And then, yeah, I'm possibly looking to open up our second UK office actually toward the end of the day.

12:45Max Buchan:Where would that be? That's super cool. I think just outside of London because we've seen a lot of technical talent. It's not necessarily all bubble tiers. So it will be probably more engineering focused. But I'll come back to you on that one. Yeah, that's cool, man. I think your point around like building from london building from the uk but building a global company i think it's often the point that is missing the whole sovereignty discussions it's like the way to be really sovereign is not to build uk solutions or european solutions it's like build the best the best version of the world from here that did it 100 and like our client base now in the us is it's gone it's got like that's the thing it's like i don't want to you don't want to like build a niche solution for a niche market right my goal is like like absolutely stay here and then fundamentally if we want to build like a you know a half trillion or one trillion pound company you are going to have to surf the entire world right but the reason i feel super passionately about that and not relocating because don't get me wrong i was very close to you know flipping us to us company when up when before before we've had all this great stuff and having great life in miami or something but the reason i doubled down here is like we have to save the country by building stuff there is no way that you can improve anything in the country without building things um and especially when we think about pensions like you know pensions invested in the footsie like we have to build stuff that's going to be on the footsie you know the next two years so i just feel very passionate about that from like a more like uk economic growth standpoint yeah i love it right let's do this you know that's the whole thesis behind you know scaling europe it's like we need to tech can be the gdp engine for the uk and for europe as it has been for the us and when you look for the future like you're obviously seeing success in the us do you see a world in which you move out there and kind of i don't know base yourself out there for a period of time to try and expand it even further what does that look like yeah it's just it's funny man i'm kind of um last year i mean to last year to like 46 47 flights was just getting really painful i was wow yeah i was in the us all the time it was horrid and we we got some great investors there so like one of our early national security focus backers is called scout ventures they're based in austin um i've just awesome awesome guys so i was spending a lot of time in texas a lot of time on the east coast as well and obviously my co-founder is based in wyoming so you know he's back and forth between wyoming and london every month so you know that's definitely definitely a bit draining um but i would say we're pretty focused on building the team here in the uk at the moment and i think for me it's because the pendulum's kind of swung at least like of my own feeling i used to be super pro remote work i absolutely hate remote work now like with a with a passion I just showed you obviously our new office set, but we took this floor in this really sick building.

15:25And just the energy right now of what we're building, the momentum, is so infectious to have in person.

15:33Max Buchan:Has that been a switch that you've made out of Valerian from remote to in person? Have you been in person since day one? No, we were super remote. When we were early days, even in COVID, when we were starting the company, we were obviously out to be remote. and then we've just like I think also it has happened naturally you know we've got a really cool office now that people want to be in you know and we've got like you know we've all been watching the World Cup quite a lot whilst working like while this happens and so yeah just kind of trying to create great vibes and also I sit here in my linen shirts despite working very long hours so at least they're true to being European and again going back to 12 months down the line if you if things don't go well if things fail if you don't achieve the success or the growth that you want to see what would have caused it yeah so i think about like obviously it's my job to think about risk right um i think for us right now the only risk we have is execution risk and um and a lot of that comes down to hiring right i'm a big i'm a huge believer in talent density i would much rather have a team of 50 tier one people than 500 you know tier two folks and so we take hiring extremely seriously i mean man the last jobs we've posted and we're a small company we're by no means like a like a large one but we've had like a thousand applicants for the last few roles so like we've we've obviously and kira ahead of people is incredible and just sifting through that and so we tried to keep the bar extremely high because right now you know it's ours to lose as they say right it's just an execution piece and making sure the wheels don't fall off and when did when did that switch happen at some point where you felt like it was yours to lose was there a moment in time where you sort of instead of pushing a boulder uphill it kind of felt like you were trying to chase something down yeah it was definitely this year it was definitely like you know because we were building we had this strong thesis but a thesis is still a thesis before it's proven so it was like we knew this was important we also had this idea of agnosticism that actually we didn't want to be our company we wanted to build an abstraction above compute to serve as different markets um but it was it was a theory right so like it was really first quarter of this year we released like put some really big numbers up on the board and now we're like you know next month i think we're deploying like you know we've got 11 quite large deployments next month for instance lined up already and so like it we're just in that position right now it's like okay the thing works that's very clear there's very clearly a very large market let's just please not go and mess this up and so um we've been good about that one thing i would say by the way said is my old boss right this is quite funny as you know said like before this i was on the early founding team of business called coin shares which ended up going public my old boss ryan who was the founding ceo of that business who moved out to palm beach after the ipo had just moved back to london to be my chief revenue officer so we're kind of no way yeah it's really interesting man because he was like my mentor and my first boss and now he and now we're kind of reversing roles a bit so that's really fun that's so interesting i don't think i've ever heard that before like oh what was that uh did you pitch it to him were you talking to him about this role like how did that come about yeah well it's funny he was my first investor like he put in like 25 000 bucks like right at the beginning i don't think super listen to what i was doing if we're all being honest he's just like you know whatever i'm sure he'll do something i mean see me even though i kind of pitch in and then obviously i called him and obviously you know kind of um he bought this house out in palm beach and i was like hey we did this thing and then i mentioned the nea round and there's kind of ears bugged up he's like wait what are you what are you guys doing again and then he went off did a huge amount of research and was like dude this is the biggest arena in the world right now um and he and he's incredible he's the best gtm leader i've ever met in my life he's had three very successful companies now and he was like this is the biggest arena for me to play in so he's moved to north london now from from palm beach to come and be our cro so um yeah man really excited about that that's an amazing story how much does that how much does that mean to you to have somebody like that you know your boss mentor now saying to you i want to work for you yeah it's kind of almost it was emotional i've got this really funny picture that i'll send you if like us in new york i was 21 and i look i look about 15 i was like this tiny little baby um ryan used to call me the duckling because i used to like waddle around like behind it just like running around as we were building this kind of complete rocket ship um but you know learned really really quickly obviously i left when i was 24 to go and start this um obviously it's a huge row of confidence but i think fundamentally like it's really clear that like ryan's not here because he's my boy because obviously we are extremely close like when you wake up but he you know he's he obviously never needed to work again so he's come out of retirement in his late you know late 30s to do this thing and work like 14 hours a day so um that's that's really exciting for us i mean it's amazing right you don't need to worry about his quality of work is out but right someone who's getting into the arena just for the fight and that's what's actually a really interesting point i've noticed it's like you're you know you you you like remove all kind of monetary aspects of it and it's purely you want to be the best like you want to play in the biggest arena in the world and you know you're the best and it's actually like that's been disfascinating to watch because you're playing on a kind of more meta meta level yeah do you screen for people that in the application process is that something that you look for like these sort of people who are just in it for the fight yeah it's super hard to it's super um super hard to scoop for that and obviously we've got you know if you look at us in team like you know like nix our chair co-founder trades did really well i mean you know just met the targets of panthers had a little success there as well i mean a lot of our team has but you know what we most look for is scale of ambition right because you know no one's coming and joining this team to build a billion dollar company right it's it's very much how do we build a generation like a category to find a company how do we build a five six seven hundred million dollars so that's that's very much it and very being aligned on on outcome and where we think we're headed on level of ambition that's amazing that's well look we're out of time massive congratulations it's like i love what you're doing you guys are absolutely flying so um yeah congrats and uh yeah i'm sure we'll chat again 12 months maybe less when the next round comes out you continue to fly mate thank you dude i uh well we'll have to do a beer soon and not just each other on the street yeah oh it's great to see you mate take care

21:51Thank you.