Two British military veterans have secured a $20m (£14.8m) investment led by Plural for their startup Labrys, used for managing teams operating in high-risk environments.
Royal Marine veteran August Lersten and former army officer Luke Wattam founded Labrys in 2020, inspired by their frontline experience.
The company aims to provide humanitarian organisations, defence forces, crisis response teams and logistics providers with secure and reliable communication and team management tools for difficult circumstances.
The end-to-end “command and control platform”, called Axiom, combines HR and task management tools with encrypted communication tools protected by biometric identity checks.
Axiom can verify user identity and provide geo-tagged tasks and audits to track missions and teams.
It also comes with a stablecoin disbursement system to allow for rapid international payments, with teams operating in regions with limited banking infrastructure in mind.
“Being unable to verify if a person can be trusted, if a task has been completed or work out how to pay them has been preventing successful humanitarian, aid and military missions for too long,” said Lersten.
“Yet solving the issues has historically been considered too complex and too difficult, leaving organisations stuck using disparate and insecure platforms.
“We created Labrys to solve these tough workforce and team coordination problems in logistics, risk and humanitarian crisis response and we’ve built a talented team to tackle the hardest technical problems in this space.”
Alongside the investment from Plural, the VC firm founded by Ian Hogarth and Taavet Hinrikus, Labrys has received backing from AlbionVC, Superangel,Project A, MDOne, Expeditions Fund and Marque Ventures.
“A lot of defence and resilience innovation focuses on hardware assets. Yet, there’s been a gap around secure, reliable system for human coordination when it matters most – until now,” said Plural partner Sten Tamkivi.
“August and Luke’s experience on the literal front lines means they know exactly the challenges experienced on the ground and are building Labrys to solve these challenges once and for all.”
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