Twin Prime raises $10M pre-seed to build AI models for defence and security
What's the deal? Twin Prime, a frontier AI lab building specialised models for defence and security, has raised $10M in pre-seed funding led by Expeditions, a defence-focused VC firm. Additional backers include American and European VCs, European defence manufacturer Theon, family offices, and angels from Palantir, Anduril, and Quorum.
The company is developing AI models that reason on data from multiple sensor types across the physical world — particularly in defence and security — to help operators act in real time against threats.
Why now? Twin Prime was cofounded in 2025 by George Lentzas, Stephane Sezer, Drew Calcagno, and Michael Leite-Garcia, a multinational team with backgrounds spanning frontier AI research, quantitative finance, and national security. Their collective experience includes stints at Hudson River Trading, Google Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the White House, the Pentagon, and branches of US and European armed forces.
The timing reflects growing demand for AI that works in high-stakes, edge-computing environments where existing general-purpose models fall short. "Current AI models are not specialised enough to capture the complexity of modern war and wider security challenges," said Mikolaj Firlej, co-founder and GP of Expeditions. "They usually have limited applicability on the edge and they often miss sensor integration and critical data feeds."
What could go wrong? Defence AI is a crowded and complicated space. Twin Prime must compete not just with well-funded startups like Anduril and Palantir, but also with legacy defence primes that are building their own AI capabilities. Selling into government procurement pipelines is notoriously slow, and the company will need to navigate complex regulatory and classification hurdles across multiple countries.
The signal: A $10M pre-seed is substantial for a company with no disclosed product in market, reflecting how aggressively capital is flowing into defence-specific AI. The involvement of angels from Palantir — itself a late-growth giant that has long dominated the defence data analytics space — suggests insiders see room for a new generation of purpose-built, edge-native models that even established players have yet to deliver.
Read more: expeditionsfund.com
