AI and Defence Take Centre Stage at StrictlyVC Los Angeles

On 18 June, The Aerospace Corporation campus in Los Angeles will host a new edition of StrictlyVC, TechCrunch's event format focused on direct conversations between investors and founders. The evening's agenda revolves around three main themes: defence technology, artificial intelligence, and current fundraising dynamics. It is no coincidence that these converge in the same space.

Over the past eighteen months, the intersection of AI and defence has stopped being an uncomfortable topic for Silicon Valley's investment ecosystem and its surrounding regions. Funds that once avoided any government or dual-use contracts now compete for the same deals. Geopolitical context, DARPA and DoD contracts, and pressure for returns in a still-narrow exit market have reconfigured priorities.

What will be debated and why it matters now

StrictlyVC's format is deliberately informal: roundtables, small-group conversations, no major keynotes. This proves useful precisely when topics are sensitive. Discussing defence tech on an open panel forces oversimplification; doing so in a smaller room with investors and founders already operating in that space allows for deeper detail: contract structures, acquisition timelines, differences between selling to the Pentagon and selling to an allied European government.

AI appears as a connecting thread, not as a separate topic. Nearly all relevant defence technology today, from recognition systems to autonomous logistics to intelligence analysis, has components of language models or computer vision. This means founders of generalist AI startups increasingly find themselves, whether they seek it or not, in conversations about dual-use applications of their products.

The third axis, fundraising, reflects a reality that any European or Latin American founder who has tried to raise a round in the past two years knows well: the market has been reconfigured. Mega-funds remain active in later stages, but early-stage has seen many institutional investors slow the pace of new commitments. Events like this also serve as a barometer: what theses GPs are willing to defend publicly tells you quite a bit about where money is flowing.

For whom this event is relevant

The natural audience for StrictlyVC LA consists of founders and operators based on the US West Coast, but the debate has broader resonance. Any team building on AI infrastructure, including integrations with Anthropic APIs, tools running on MCP servers or industry-focused autonomous agents, should pay attention to how defence-specialised investors are framing the value of these technologies. The categories they use to justify valuations will eventually filter through to the rest of the market.

It is also relevant for those tracking regulatory evolution. The concentration of defence tech, AI and venture capital in the same conversation space tends to produce public positions that later appear in lobby documents or congressional testimony. What is said on 18 June on an aerospace campus in Los Angeles will not stay contained there.

A note on timing

That TechCrunch is scheduling this event now, rather than a year ago, makes sense. The debate on AI in defence has matured enough to move beyond speculative territory. There are signed contracts, deployed products and, in some cases, documented early controversies over use. This makes conversations more concrete and probably more useful.

At ClaudeWave we continue to follow with interest how these kinds of gatherings consolidate investment narratives that then affect the entire ecosystem of tools and agents built on language models. Not because defence is the natural destination for these technologies, but because the money that enters through that door tends to redefine which functionalities are prioritised in foundational models.