The European Defence Fund was designed to draw smaller undertakings into cross-border defence programmes, and at the same time to help the technologies those undertakings carry reach industrial scale. The two purposes are compatible in policy and divergent at company level. A software house that wins a place in a multinational consortium becomes, by that fact, a more attractive target for a prime contractor; a sensing or space specialist that proves its technology in a research action must then raise the capital to industrialise it. Growth, whether it arrives as a cheque from dispersed investors or as a strategic shareholder from within the sector, changes the legal description of the company the Fund contracted with — and it does not change it in one direction or by one mechanism. An undertaking may enter a project as a small or medium-sized enterprise, raise capital while a grant is being prepared, accept a minority industrial shareholder during implementation, or pass under the control of a prime before the action is complete, and each of those events engages a different rule, on a different date, for a different purpose. Company size, economic linkage, corporate control, third-country control, consortium independence and the funding rate of a particular activity are routinely treated as expressions of a single status, and they are not. The practical question for anyone financing European rearmament is therefore narrower than the familiar one about whether an acquired company loses its EU funding: when capital changes the legal perimeter of an EDF participant, which conditions of public support move with it, and which remain intact unless a specific programme or grant rule says otherwise?