Europe’s Hybrid Capital Architecture: How New Public-Private Vehicles Are Redirecting Funds into Defence, Dual-Use and Deep Tech
Europe’s defence and dual-use investment landscape is being re-engineered around a coordinated architecture that merges public capital with private-sector leverage. The shift reflects a new conception of sovereignty: technological readiness and strategic autonomy are now treated as public goods, requiring the mobilisation of supranational financial instruments rather than traditional national procurement. Four pillars define this architecture — the NATO Innovation Fund, the EU’s SAFE loan framework, the equity channels of the European Defence Fund and European Investment Bank, and the growing ecosystem of listed thematic ETFs. Together they form a continuum from seed-stage innovation to market-scale industrialisation. Each mechanism responds to a different segment of the capability chain, from research to production, yet all share a single mandate: to strengthen Europe’s technological base and ensure defence resilience in a context of deteriorating transatlantic certainty and intensifying geoeconomic competition.