Keen Venture Partners publishes practical guide for European defence tech founders navigating French defence procurement

Flag of france on military uniform

Today, Keen Venture Partners released “Navigating French defence procurement: A practical (and surely incomplete) guide for European defence tech founders.”

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS, November 6, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- France will spend €57.1 billion on defence in 2026 and is rearming faster than at any point in a generation, yet it buys from its own industry first. Keen’s fourth European procurement white paper maps which of the ministry’s six families of buyer actually pays, which doors open without a programme, and where companies lose a year before they reach a contract.

A founder can spend a year winning over French soldiers. The trials go well, the operators are convinced, and the answer still comes back that the product cannot be bought. In France, the functional need and the technical rules are judged by different people, and only one of them attends the demonstration. It is usually the last thing a founder learns, and the most expensive.

“The defence of France must be French,” Charles de Gaulle told his officers in 1959, and the sentence still explains the market. 92% of what the Direction générale de l’armement (Directorate General for Armament, DGA) paid out in 2024 went to companies based in France. Few markets are harder for a startup from elsewhere in Europe to enter, and few are worth more once you are in.

“[...] a French Ministry of the Armed Forces reference isn’t worth its euros alone. It’s worth the export door it opens [...] by helping you integrate effectively with the French primes that win abroad. [...] I often say: joining a winning export bid is like joining an orchestra. Start with the conductor.” - Eric Fournier, CEO & Co-founder, Gallium Defense

The money is not the obstacle; its shape is. The August 2026 update of the loi de programmation militaire added €36 billion over 2026–2030 and set defence spending at 2.5% of GDP by 2030, and the DGA placed €38 billion of orders in 2025, more than double the year before. But France signs equipment contracts for their full multi-year value and votes the cash one year at a time. Two thirds of what the ministry spends outside salaries in 2026 settles contracts signed in earlier years, and practitioners estimate that around nine tenths of the equipment budget is already committed to long-running programmes.

Some things have shifted in the founder’s favour. Since March 2025 the procédure d’acquisition réactive has been the standing fast route for a named urgent need, replacing the urgent-procurement procedure most published guides still describe. The centres experts référents, created at the end of 2025, bring the DGA, the military and industry together with budgets of their own. And the August 2026 law obliges public buyers to prefer a sovereign European drone system, from propulsion and airframe to data links and control software.

Today, Amsterdam- and London-based venture capital firm Keen Venture Partners released “Navigating French defence procurement: A practical (and surely incomplete) guide for European defence tech founders.” It follows the Dutch edition published in June 2026, the UK edition in July 2026, and the German edition in September 2026, and is the fourth in a series through which Keen intends to map the procurement system of every European NATO ministry of defence, with the aim of creating a faster, stronger, and more united Europe.

The paper maps the six families of buyer inside the ministry, four of which are not the DGA. It shows which doors open before there is a programme, from the innovation agency’s single front door to paid testing at DGA technical centres. And it sets out four places founders get stuck: a buyer short of staff, the gap between a prototype and a fieldable product, the scarce attention of the engineers who decide, and a preference for suppliers who have delivered before.

Keen notes that the paper reflects its own interpretation, not an official position, and that in a system reorganising this quickly it will contain mistakes. “We tried really hard to be precise and complete, but we surely missed or misunderstood some structures or links. Please shout, and

Availability. The full white paper is available on request via defence@keenventurepartners.com and via this link distributed alongside this release: https://mailchi.mp/keenventurepartners/navigating-french-defence-procurement

Keen Venture Partners BV
Keen Venture Partners BV
+31 6 17753979
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn