There is a spreadsheet in Prague that tracks the deal flow for a €150 million fund. The columns include the usual venture metrics — team, traction, TAM, burn rate — but also a field that most European VCs have never needed: NATO interoperability. Tichomir Jenkut reviews this spreadsheet regularly. He is looking for startups that can build technologies capable of operating in environments where failure is not measured in lost revenue but in lost lives.
That filter — the gap between commercial viability and operational lethality — is where Presto Tech Horizons operates. It is also where one of the most consequential shifts in European venture capital is playing out, largely unnoticed by the ecosystem that still equates European tech with SaaS platforms and consumer fintech.
The Pivot No One Predicted
Presto Ventures began as a conventional Central European VC. Seed-stage software companies. Czech and Slovak founders building products for European markets. The kind of fund that conferences celebrate and LPs understand. Then February 2022 happened, and the thesis changed.
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine did not just redraw Europe's security map — it exposed a structural failure in how the continent finances defence innovation. Legacy contractors operate on procurement cycles measured in decades. Startups building AI-driven navigation systems, acoustic detection platforms, and next-generation cybersecurity solutions operate on cycles measured in months. The mismatch is not just inefficient; in a wartime context, it is dangerous.
Presto partnered with Czechoslovak Group, one of Central Europe's largest defence and industrial conglomerates, and launched Presto Tech Horizons in 2024 — a fund specifically designed to bridge that gap. The thesis: back post-revenue startups across NATO and allied countries, with ticket sizes between €300K and €3M, targeting 30 to 50 investments over three years.
The Investor's Edge
Jenkut's path to defence tech investing is itself a case study in how unconventional backgrounds produce sharper investors. A graduate of Bath Business School, he cut his teeth at Klarna — where he led financial analytics in the Czech Republic — and in M&A consulting at EY. His early career included a stint at Matsuko, a deep tech startup developing holographic communication technology, which gave him a practitioner's understanding of how breakthrough technologies navigate the gap between laboratory proof-of-concept and market deployment.
That combination — financial rigour from fintech, pattern recognition from consulting, and technical empathy from deep tech — is precisely what defence tech investing demands. The sector's founders are often brilliant engineers with limited commercial instincts. The incumbents have commercial infrastructure but move at institutional speed. An investor who can evaluate both a thermal signature detection algorithm and a NATO procurement pathway is rarer than either.
Why Vienna
The Human × AI Conference is structured around the premise that Europe's AI future depends on more than model architectures and regulatory frameworks — it depends on capital allocation. Jenkut represents a new class of European investor: one whose thesis is shaped not by Silicon Valley trend cycles but by geopolitical imperatives that the continent can no longer defer.
Defence tech is the sharpest test case for the broader question the conference aims to address: can Europe build sovereign technological capability in domains where dependency on external providers is an existential risk? Presto Tech Horizons is betting €150 million that the answer is yes — and that the builders are already here, waiting for capital that understands their domain.
Jenkut brings to Vienna the investor's perspective on a question that policy panels and academic keynotes tend to leave abstract: what does it actually take to fund, scale, and deploy AI-driven technologies in sectors where the margin for error is zero? His answer, shaped by a portfolio of startups operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence and national security, is likely to be the most operationally grounded contribution to the conference's capital and sovereignty conversation.
Implications
- For founders in dual-use tech: Presto Tech Horizons represents a new archetype of European investor — one that combines venture capital agility with defence sector access through its CSG partnership. Jenkut's background in fintech analytics and deep tech offers founders an investor who can evaluate both the technology and the go-to-market in regulated, high-stakes domains.
- For enterprise leaders: The convergence of commercial AI and defence applications is creating a new category of dual-use technology companies. Understanding how this investment thesis operates — and which startups it is producing — is increasingly relevant for enterprises working in cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and government technology.
- For conference attendees: Expect a practitioner investor's perspective on the most consequential reallocation of European venture capital since the clean-tech boom — and a candid assessment of what it takes to build companies in sectors where the customer is the state and the competition is a geopolitical adversary.
Tichomir Jenkut joins Human × AI on May 19, 2026, in Vienna.