Two British military veterans have secured a £15m investment led by Plural for their startup Labrys, which provides a secure platform for managing teams operating in high-risk environments.
Labrys was founded in 2020 by Royal Marine veteran August Lersten and former army officer Luke Wattam, based on their direct frontline experience. The company offers humanitarian organisations, defence forces, crisis response teams and logistics providers a secure and reliable suite of tools for communication and team management in challenging conditions.
Its platform, Axiom, integrates encrypted communication tools with HR and task management systems, all protected by biometric identity verification. The system enables geo-tagged task tracking, user auditing and includes a stablecoin disbursement feature to facilitate rapid international payments, particularly for areas with limited banking infrastructure.
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. 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.
August Lersten, Co-founder
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. 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.
Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural
