Peter Sarlin's road to European defence AI with NestAI

NestAI is a startup that raised €100M with the stated ambition of building more AI sovereignty for Europe's militaries. It is led by Peter Sarlin, a Finnish founder whose other venture is PostScriptum. The piece is a profile of him, written by Fiona Alston and Ingrid Lunden and published on October 29, 2026 in the European Defence section.

Sarlin says NestAI is his biggest priority right now, and that it remains separate from his other activities. On PostScriptum, he says the company continues to do a number of things to drive that work and build competitive technology. His reasoning for putting defence first is blunt: "ultimately, if there's no security, then the rest doesn't really matter."

The text also places NestAI in a crowded field. Its competitors include large, vertically integrated European defence tech companies such as Helsing and Quantum Systems, and smaller European startups that focus only on the operating system layer, such as ComandAI. Primes and many defence tech startups from the US and elsewhere outside Europe are in the market too. The article is tagged with AI, autonomy, command and control, Finland, Nokia and Peter Sarlin.

Sarlin also describes how he thinks about the problem the industry faces. He says the world is solving it one city at a time, by constantly adapting to a changing environment.

A related piece linked from the page reports that Europe's Eastern Flank invests more in defence tech than the US, NATO and the rest of Europe.