On 27 August 2026 the European Commission updated the investment guidelines of the European Innovation Council Fund so that they cover defence-related activities. Ten weeks earlier it had amended the 2026 EIC Work Programme to open a EUR 100 million call offering equity investments of EUR 10 million to EUR 30 million in critical defence technologies. A public venture investor that had until then been confined to civil applications thus became available to European defence start-ups, alongside the NATO Innovation Fund, a EUR 1 billion fund launched by 22 Allies in June 2022 with a fifteen-year term and now backed by 24. Placed side by side, the two instruments seem to differ chiefly in length: fifteen years for the NATO fund, an average holding perspective of seven to ten years for the EIC Fund. The comparison is less informative than it looks. It sets the term of a whole fund against the expected holding period of a single investment, and it leaves out what usually decides whether a defence company has to find new shareholders before its technology reaches a government buyer: who controls the timing of the exit, and how much capital is held back to follow the company into later rounds. For a business whose decisive customer is a ministry of defence, those two variables determine whether public capital stays long enough to matter. The question is therefore not which horizon is longer, but how each instrument governs the moment of departure, and how much of that governance can be seen.