Keen Venture Partners publishes practical guide for European defence tech founders navigating French defence procurement

A founder can spend a year winning over French soldiers. The trials go well, the operators are convinced, and the answer still comes back that the product cannot be bought. In France, the functional need and the technical rules are judged by different people, and only one of them attends the demonstration. It is usually the last thing a founder learns, and the most expensive.

“The defence of France must be French,” Charles de Gaulle told his officers in 1959, and the sentence still explains the market. France is the only European state that holds the full range of military capability, deterrent included, without needing another government’s permission to export it. It equips its forces from national industry wherever it can: 92% of what the Direction générale de l’armement (Directorate General for Armament, DGA)paid out in 2024 went to companies based in France. Few markets are harder for a startup from elsewhere in Europe to enter, and few are worth more once you are in. In the world’s second-largest arms exporter, where the State sells alongside its industry, a French order is the reference foreign buyers ask about first.

“France is the world’s second-largest arms exporter, with nearly 10% of global transfers (SIPRI, 2026). So a French Ministry of the Armed Forces reference isn’t worth its euros alone. It’s worth the export door it opens, to the Gulf, Southeast Asia, the Nordics and beyond, by helping you integrate effectively with the French primes that win abroad. The DGA and the AID become your most underrated allies. I often say: joining a winning export bid is like joining an orchestra. Start with the conductor.” - Eric Fournier, CEO & Co-founder, Gallium Defense

The money is not the obstacle; its shape is. The August 2026 update of the loi de programmation militaire added €36 billion over 2026–2030 and set defence spending at 2.5% of GDP by 2030, and the DGA placed €38 billion of orders in 2025, more than double the year before. But France signs equipment contracts for their full multi-year value and votes the cash one year at a time. Two thirds of what the ministry spends outside salaries in 2026 settles contracts signed in earlier years, and practitioners estimate that around nine tenths of the equipment budget is already committed to long-running programmes.

“France has a significant defence budget, around €57 billion, but even greater ambitions across every defence domain. In practice, per-programme envelopes are most of the time too thin to fund a startup’s roadmap on their own. You have two moves: convince the ministry to reallocate from another programme (guess what: it’s very hard), or aggregate across the multiple envelopes that touch your use case. Most founders underestimate how much effort the second path requires, but it is the real path.” - Eric Fournier, CEO & Co-founder, Gallium Defense

Some things have shifted in the founder’s favour. Since March 2025 the procédure d’acquisition réactive has been the standing fast route for a named urgent need, replacing the urgent-procurement procedure most published guides still describe. The centres experts référents, created at the end of 2025, bring the DGA, the military and industry together with budgets of their own. And the August 2026 law obliges public buyers to prefer a sovereign European drone system, from propulsion and airframe to data links and control software.

France cared about sovereignty long before it was fashionable elsewhere. That mindset runs from nuclear deterrence down to who hosts your data. It is why the French defence budget is not comparable to its neighbours’. France deliberately kept its defence industrial base (DITB) alive to maintain its sovereignty. As a result it continues to be the only EU state with nuclear weapons and is now the world's second-largest defence exporter. Founders who say France is hard to enter are not wrong, but they miss the point: the system is not rigged; startups are simply competing against primes that have done this for fifty years and are very, very good at what they do. That deserves humility. It also creates a problem: compare the amounts raised by defence startups in France and Germany, or the valuations of the leading scale-ups in each country, and the delta is obvious. There is a real risk France never catches up on innovation. If France wants to keep its position as a global defence powerhouse, funding startups, and giving them an opportunity to prove themselves, is not optional. The opening for those new entrants lies in the gaps the primes are too big to fill. -Henry Heinemann and Florent Ogès , co-founders of LYSK

Today, Amsterdam- and London-based venture capital firm Keen Venture Partners released “Navigating French defence procurement: A practical (and surely incomplete) guide for European defence tech founders.” It follows the Dutch edition published in June 2026, the UK edition in July 2026, and the German edition in September 2026, and is the fourth in a series through which Keen intends to map the procurement system of every European NATO ministry of defence, with the aim of creating a faster, stronger, and more united Europe.

The paper maps the six families of buyer inside the ministry, four of which are not the DGA. It shows which doors open before there is a programme, from the innovation agency’s single front door to paid testing at DGA technical centres. And it sets out four places founders get stuck: a buyer short of staff, the gap between a prototype and a fieldable product, the scarce attention of the engineers who decide, and a preference for suppliers who have delivered before.

“France buys French - idealement", and says so. That is where non-French defence tech founders stop reading. But things are changing. The system that has preferred French industry for nearly seventy years is opening up to new, innovative international market entrants. This has gone almost unnoticed outside of France. We wrote this paper to set out not just what has changed, but also how to participate in it efficiently, including the parts of the process that still slow founders down. The journey is longer than in most of Europe but rewarding, so start early: rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir à point (No need to run, you need to leave on time)” - Alexander Ribbink, General Partner, Keen Venture Partners

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Keen notes that the paper reflects its own interpretation, not an official position, and that in a system reorganising this quickly it will contain mistakes. “We tried really hard to be precise and complete, but we surely missed or misunderstood some structures or links. Please shout, and help us improve.

Availability. The full white paper is available on request via defence@keenventurepartners.com and via this link distributed alongside this release.