Europe is waking up to the need to invest in defense, and so are European VCs. But with a painful history of Soviet occupations, Lithuania didn’t wait for the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to reach its third anniversary to commit 5% to 6% of its GDP to military spending — and fund defense startups.

Lithuania’s sovereign VC fund Coinvest Capital was a pioneer in that regard, and it still is an outlier in not requiring civilian use cases. “We were the first in the region [to be] fully authorized to do defense investments back in March 2023,” said Viktorija Trimbel, its managing partner since February 2023.

Unlike many Lithuanians, Trimbel is not tall at all. But what she lacks in basketball potential, she makes up for in energy and relentlessness, especially when it comes to advocating for innovation in defense tech to strengthen Europe’s security. 

Unmanned Defense Systems (UDS), a Vilnius-based company focused on optimizing the “kill chain,” received Coinvest’s largest investment in that domain, but it is not the only one. According to Trimbel, the evergreen fund has invested some €6.8 million (approximately $7.37 million) into aerospace, defense, and dual-use startups since 2023.

Compared to the billion-dollar rounds flooding into U.S. defense tech companies, the amount may not sound very impressive. That’s unless you consider it per capita, something people often urge you to do in this small Baltic country of 2.89 million inhabitants.

Co-creation is another notion that Lithuania often emphasizes, as does Coinvest. As its name suggests, the early-stage fund is co-investing into startups with business angels and other VCs. For early-stage deals, it adopted a capped profit-sharing structure that Trimbel is particularly passionate about.

As a board member of the Lithuanian Business Angel Network (LitBAN), which now has 324 members, she’s particularly keen to see more smart money flow into the market. While the collective value of Lithuania’s startup ecosystem increased 39 times in 10 years, the country still lacks an exit as impactful as Skype’s was for Estonia.

Still, liquidity events such as Vinted’s secondary sale had a drip-down effect, and Trimbel thinks Coinvest can multiply these euros fast. When it exited Interactio after just 18 months, its rules boosted angel investors’ returns from 9x to 34x. “I believe that was one of the factors which facilitated an explosive growth of the business angel ecosystem,” Trimbel said.

In defense tech, too, Trimbel champions the success of others in securing capital. Coinvest’s sole limited partner, Lithuania’s national development bank, also provided “major capital injections to other local VCs like BSV Ventures or ScaleWolf, including [the] Lithuanian contribution to the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF),” she celebrated on LinkedIn.

Similarly, Trimbel is pleased to see governments across Europe embracing the trend of “investing in deterrence and defense to further support competitiveness and resilience of European countries.”

That’s a need Lithuania is sorely aware of, often deeply personally. “When I was 18, I saw with my own eyes, Russian tanks killing people. So for us, it’s not a textbook story,” Trimbel said, referring to the 1991’s January Events in which the Soviet military attempted to suppress Lithuania’s independence movement. 

The trauma of Soviet rule that’s deeply ingrained in Lithuania’s collective memory stretches far beyond 1991. “It’s something that every family has experienced one way or another: occupation, deportations, killings. We don’t need to be taught why we need to invest in defense,” Trimbel said.

Still, since the war in Ukraine, there’s a renewed sense of urgency and solidarity. The 2025 edition of Radarom, a public fundraising campaign for Ukraine, collected more than €5.6 million for drones and anti-drone systems, including from UDS. Trimbel endorsed it, urging, “Support Ukraine NOW … and any other day till victory.”

Like nearly all Lithuanians, Trimbel recalls where she was when Russia launched its full-on invasion of its eastern neighbor on February 24, 2022. A few days earlier, she was abroad with her two daughters, and they discussed whether they should return as signs of war amounted — until her youngest daughter pointed out that they had to: They had left the cat. 

Cat or no cat, Trimbel would likely have returned to Lithuania either way. She points out that her first name, Viktorija, or Victory, is a good match for her relentless personality. Her circle of girlfriends is also up to par: “Instead of going to the bar and discussing a new handbag or a dress or lipstick, we go to the shooting range,” she said with a smile.

Of course, not everyone reacts the same way — it’s only human to experience a flight or freeze reflex. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, she aimed to get others out of this paralysis by encouraging them to take practical steps. One of them was to join volunteering initiatives that have gained steam across Lithuania.

The most emblematic organization in that field is the government-backed nonprofit Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union (LRU). While it is dedicated to the defense and strengthening of Lithuania, its activities extend beyond military training: Together with Coinvest and others, it co-organized the Fire Shield hackathon, which will return in 2025 for a third edition.

That’s the context in which Trimbel is pictured above, together with the Union’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Linas Idzelis (in uniform) and retired Lt. Col. Valerijus Šerelis, former squadron commander of the special operations forces that the not-that-random country sent to support NATO allies in Afghanistan after 9/11.

LRU also contributed to civilian response during the COVID-19 pandemic, as did Trimbel, who invested efforts into a helmet-based ventilation protection project. “COVID was a good rehearsal to mobilize society during times of threat,” she said. For her, that threat has now changed, but it is very much real.

But even now, Trimbel cares about areas other than defense tech, and so does Coinvest. She spoke enthusiastically of portfolio startup Walk15 and its upcoming “Labrador walk,” an outdoors hike with dogs to encourage people to take more steps to be more active — literally. 

However, as she wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, “no other investment returns will matter if Ukraine will not receive sufficient support from allies and Europe will be invaded further.” As her name and personality suggest, she won’t relent in her efforts to prevent this outcome.