Polish VC Backs Labrys to Reinvent Crisis Zone Workforce Tools
London’s Labrys Secures €17.5M to Fix Broken Coordination in Crisis Zones—with Polish VC Expeditions Fund Among Backers
As geopolitical instability, humanitarian disasters, and cyber threats rise globally, the need for secure and reliable workforce coordination tools has never been greater. Enter Labrys, a London-based startup building a military-grade workforce management platform—and now backed with €17.5 million in fresh capital to scale its vision. While the funding round was led by Plural, a high-profile early-stage fund founded by European tech veterans, one of the key backers in the round is Warsaw’s Expeditions Fund—a Polish VC firm increasingly active in defense tech and resilience infrastructure. Other participants include AlbionVC, Superangel, Project A, MDOne, and Marque Ventures. With this round, Labrys’ total raised to date reaches €22 million, placing it among Europe’s fastest-growing startups addressing logistics and coordination challenges in high-risk environments like Ukraine and other fragile zones.
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From the Front Lines to the Command Line
Labrys was founded by August Lersten, a former Royal Marine, and Luke Wattam, a British Army officer. Their battlefield experience gave rise to Axiom — a comprehensive platform designed to replace insecure and fragmented tools like spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and email.
“We created Labrys to solve tough coordination problems in logistics, risk, and humanitarian crisis response,” says Lersten. “The current patchwork of tools is putting missions and lives at risk. Axiom brings everything into a secure, verifiable, and programmable system.”
The platform integrates:
Encrypted communications
Geo-tagged and auditable task management
Biometric identity verification
Stablecoin-based payment infrastructure for use in disconnected or sanctioned regions
It’s already used by governments, defense actors, and humanitarian groups, generating seven-figure annual revenues just a year after its seed round. Labrys claims clients can save up to $3 million in operational costs through more efficient and secure team coordination.
Why Poland’s Expeditions Fund Is All In
For Expeditions Fund, headquartered in Warsaw, the investment in Labrys fits squarely into its broader thesis: supporting dual-use and sovereign technology infrastructure critical to European stability. The fund has become one of Poland’s most prominent early-stage investors in deep-tech, focusing on AI, defense, cybersecurity, and communications. In recent months, Expeditions Fund has also backed Lendurai, an Estonian startup building autonomous UAVs for GPS-denied environments—another signal of Poland’s emerging influence in defense innovation.
“Labrys is tackling one of the least sexy but most critical challenges in crisis response—trust,” said a representative from Expeditions Fund. “By creating a secure, verifiable, and programmable command infrastructure, they’re laying the groundwork for coordinated action in the world’s most difficult environments.”
The investment also underscores a broader shift: Central and Eastern Europe is no longer just a user of security tools but increasingly a builder of foundational technologies.
What’s Next for Labrys? The company will use the funds to:
Expand its engineering and operations teams
Integrate advanced AI features to improve coordination reliability
Deepen its stablecoin payment systems, which bypass fragile banking infrastructure
Axiom is designed not only for governments and defense, but also for logistics firms, NGOs, and response teams working in natural disaster zones or politically unstable regions.
As global crises intensify—from war zones to climate disasters—platforms like Labrys will be essential for managing risk, coordinating people, and restoring control where chaos is the norm. Explore more: https://www.labrys.tech/
