Two years after securing $1 billion in commitments from over 20 countries, the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) is entering a new chapter, marked by the arrival of two new partners and the departure of a founding team partner.
In a context of increased military spending across NATO members, investment in dual-use technology has skyrocketed since the initiative was first announced in 2021. Once a no-go zone for institutional investors, defense and resilience tech last year reached an all-time high of 10% of all VC funding in Europe, where nearly all of NIF’s backers are located.
This boom should have given NIF a first-mover advantage, but the fund was hampered by management challenges and a series of high-profile departures. After the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague reaffirmed its importance last June, NIF is now emerging with an almost entirely new investment team.
While NIF originally had four partners and one managing partner, it is now composed of three partners. A person familiar with NIF said this flat, three-partner structure will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
Two of the partners are new hires: Ulrich Quay and Sander Verbrugge, who will be based in Amsterdam. Quay, a German national, was most recently in charge of corporate investments as a vice president at BMW, where he previously founded and led corporate venture fund BMW i Ventures. Verbrugge, who is Dutch and has a PhD in molecular biophysics, was previously a partner at deep tech VC fund Innovation Industries, which he joined after working at semiconductor design and manufacturing company NXP.
The third partner is London-based VC Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, who is the last remaining member of the original investment team.
Alongside the new hires, the fund announced the departure of founding team partner Kelly Chen, who tells TechCrunch that leaving was her decision and that she will be building a new venture. Chris O’Connor, another founding team partner, left NIF earlier this year with similar plans.
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Chen currently sits on the board of several startups backed by NIF but will transition her board responsibilities once her employment at the NIF has wrapped up, TechCrunch learned from its chief communications and marketing officer, Amalia Kontesi.
While some observers wish the fund had deployed capital faster, Kontesi said NIF “is on track to meet [its] investing goals for the year.” Since its inception, NIF has made 19 investments: seven into funds such as OTB Ventures and 12 into startups, including Space Forge and Tekever, which make dual-use drones.
Adding new partners with industrial and scientific backgrounds, no matter how impressive, may not satisfy those who wish the fund could invest in Ukraine or pure defense, as opposed to dual use, in response to Russia’s war economy. But the NIF’s broader thesis is to “empower deep tech founders to address challenges in defence, security, and resilience.”
In the meantime, NIF has also ramped up its efforts on the defense side. Its team was heavily involved in the development of NATO’s Rapid Adoption Action Plan, aimed at accelerating the adoption and integration of new technological products for defense. NIF has also been building up its Mission Platform Group with strategic hires, including John Ridge, who was hired as chief adoption officer in 2024 to help portfolio startups navigate military procurement.
As for its new partners, they were once again hired through a process previously described by VC Michael Jackson as akin to “building a boy band.” They weren’t teamed up based on shared history or chemistry, in other words; they were identified by NIF’s board of directors and approved by LPs.
That process may be inevitable for an organization that now counts 24 countries as limited partners but is widely believed to be one reason the previous team didn’t gel. This time, all three partners got to meet throughout the recruitment process and spend time together to “ensure a smooth transition and to position the team for long-term success,” Kontesi said.
In a statement shared exclusively with TechCrunch, NIF’s vice chair, Professor Fiona Murray, compared the organization to a startup. “We are proud of what we accomplished, but like any effective team we are learning, experimenting, improving: speeding up our processes, expanding our platform support for startups, doubling down on ecosystem building and more broadly recognizing the need to build the sector and the capital stack.”
Murray expressed pride in having brought together a qualified team that can collaborate effectively, creatively, and quickly. “They will enable us to move even more rapidly and decisively to drive the Alliance’s technological agenda and support the best founders across European ecosystems,” she previously wrote in a joint statement with NIF’s chair, Klaus Hommels.
Hommels’ other activities as an investor have prompted questions about possible conflicts of interest, but no change appears to have been made to his role during NIF’s recent LP meeting in Venice. Rather than dwelling further on its reorganization, NIF seems set on helping NATO become more resilient.
“In this next phase,” NIF’s vice chair said, “you’ll see us refocus on DSR opportunities and emphasize building companies that can drive industrial scale and really support ecosystems across Europe.”
