Valarian
Valarian builds ACRA, a control layer that lets governments and regulated enterprises run AI and mission-critical workloads on any compute — cloud, on-premises, air-gapped or tactical edge — while holding their own keys and jurisdiction.
Background
Max Buchan founded the company in London in 2020, incorporating it in November 2019 under the name Worldr. His starting point was not defence at all.
After a stint as the first employee at digital asset manager CoinShares, he set out to build a private alternative to Slack and Microsoft Teams, then pivoted from the messenger itself to the layer underneath it: a zero-trust wrapper that kept corporate communications inside the customer's own environment rather than a vendor's. Regulated finance was the first market. The company renamed itself Valarian Technologies in November 2023.
Defence arrived through the door rather than by design. A US government customer asked whether the platform could be extended to national sovereignty, and Josh McLaughlin — a former US Army Ranger and Palantir managing director who opened the firm's Doha office — joined as co-founder and COO in 2023 to build that side out.
Valarian Defence launched publicly in May 2025. The business now runs two tracks, Enterprise and Defence, on one platform. Nick Trim, Darktrace's co-founder and former COO, chairs the board.