A tech startup founded by two British military veterans has raised $20 million to expand its secure coordination and payments platform for defence, humanitarian and disaster response teams.
Labrys Technologies, co-founded by Royal Marines veteran August “Gus” Lersten and former army linguistics specialist Luke Wattam, developed its flagship platform Axiom to address growing concerns over “shadow IT” in high-risk environments — where official secure systems are bypassed by quick-fix tools like WhatsApp, Signal or Wickr.
The platform has already been approved for use by the UK Ministry of Defence and deployed by NATO member states and humanitarian agencies, including the Ukrainian emergency services during the Kakhovka dam disaster in 2023.
“A lot of the public sector and adjacent organisations rely heavily on chat apps that weren’t built for this purpose,” said Lersten, now CEO of Labrys. “You don’t always know who’s on the other end, there are no checks or task verification, and you can’t ensure compliance. That’s a massive trust and security gap.”
Labrys aims to bridge that gap with a platform that blends military-grade security with real-time coordination tools, user verification, and secure payments infrastructure. The $20 million Series A round was led by Plural, the investment firm co-founded by Wise’s Taavet Hinrikus. The latest raise brings Labrys’s total funding to $25.5 million.
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