There is a particular kind of power that comes with someone who decides, quietly, which ideas get funded and which don't. Robert de Groot, and his team, holds that power over an extraordinary range of things: military bridges in Poland, rocket launchers in Spain, satellite-to-smartphone startups in Luxembourg, drone intelligence software in Estonia.
As Vice President of the world's largest multilateral lender, the EIB sitting on the Kirchberg plateau, his brief covers security, defence, space, and innovation. It is, as he puts it with characteristic understatement, "quite a new direction" for a bank that, not long ago, wouldn't touch defence at all.
That has changed. Dramatically. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EIB has rewritten its mandate, opening five distinct financing pillars across the defence and security ecosystem, from large-scale infrastructure to venture equity for startups building things that didn't exist five years ago. De Groot has spent the last two years touring every European capital, sitting down with defence, finance, and interior ministers, and asking "What does Europe actually need, and can we finance it?"
"The urgency I hear in private is far greater than what you see in public."
What he found on the road was a continent with a perception gap. The Baltic states are operating in a different psychological reality from much of western Europe. For Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the threat from the east is not geopolitics but geography. However, de Groot is cautiously optimistic. Germany has made a near-complete reversal on defence spending in three years. The Nordics have joined NATO. Ministers of Interior are now showing up to defence finance meetings, because the boundary between military security and civil security has dissolved. Cyber attacks, compromised energy grids, sabotaged undersea cables are happening now.
The physical problems, meanwhile, are startlingly concrete. Bridges that cannot carry battle tanks. Ports unable to defend against unmanned underwater vehicles. Roads along NATO transit routes from Antwerp through Germany deep into Poland that haven't been maintained to handle today's military hardware.
"It sounds absurd", de Groot says, "until you realise it's a multi-billion euro problem". The financing exists. The fixes are underway. But getting three countries to agree on a shared corridor before one of them goes its own way remains the harder challenge.
For innovators and entrepreneurs building the dual-use technologies that now sit at the heart of European defence strategy, de Groot offers a map through the financing ecosystem. Early stage? Venture capital funds backed by the European Investment Fund. Series A and B? Venture debt, a product barely known in Europe five years ago, now scaling fast, with Luxembourg companies OQ Technology and Artec 3D among its beneficiaries. Series C and beyond? The European Tech Champions Initiative, designed explicitly to stop European unicorns from decamping to California. And for defence tech specifically, a new Defence Equity Facility of up to one billion euros: real, patient, European capital, with no American relocation clause attached.
"The companies I meet across Europe mostly want to stay. We need to make sure the financing is there when they do."
On the day of interview, a loan was signed for the Luxembourg Fire Brigade's logistics infrastructure. Security exists at multiple scales simultaneously, from orbital launch capability to the speed at which a fire engine reaches a crisis. Both matter and both require investment. Both represent the same underlying bet: that Europe, if it chooses to move with enough conviction, is more than capable of defending and financing its own future. De Groot, for his part, seems to believe it. The question, as ever, is whether the institutions can move as fast as the moment requires.
Robert de Groot is Vice President of the European Investment Bank, responsible for Security, Defence, Space and Innovation Finance.
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The man who helps finance Europe's defence: Robert de Groot Vice President of the European Investment Bank explains why this matters & how choices are made
