He felt that Western governments were quietly handing the keys to their most sensitive operations to American tech giants—and would eventually lose the ability to control what their own intelligence and infrastructure ran on. Most enterprises, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, had three cloud servers—U.S., Europe, Asia—and nobody called it a vulnerability. Buchan, 24 at the time and fresh off helping take a fintech company from zero to a unicorn (which later listed on the Nasdaq at $1.2 billion), thought it was going to be catastrophic. 

Buchan and co-founder Josh McLaughlin now lead Valarian, a London-based startup that builds the software layer governments and enterprises deploy underneath their AI systems to ensure it controls how that intelligence operates, what data can be accessed, and who can shut it off. McLaughlin comes to Valarian after a career as a managing director at Palantir. 

Valarian has raised a $50 million Series A led by NEA, Fortune learned exclusively. The round brings total funding to $70 million and marks NEA’s first defense and dual-use investment in Europe.

The company’s software, ACRA, acts as a sealed operating room around AI workloads and sensitive applications. Government departments and businesses can keep using Amazon or Microsoft cloud infrastructure—but Valarian’s layer controls exactly what data leaves, who touches it, and when. That matters because of the U.S. CLOUD Act. American authorities can compel U.S.-based companies to hand over data they hold anywhere in the world. Buchan’s argument is that sovereignty can’t be a settings toggle inside someone else’s infrastructure. It has to be the infrastructure itself.

Valarian’s rise comes amidst several geopolitical kerfuffles. European defense spending hit $447 billion last year. An incoming U.K. prime minister is moving to cancel a state Palantir contract—part of a broader European pullback from the U.S. data giant. And, when the Trump administration cut off Anthropic’s access abroad this year, Buchan said infrastructure sovereignty shifted from an abstract policy debate to a live emergency. “No one could use their model anymore, because the president of another country had shut it off,” he told me. 

NEA’s Mustafa Neemuchwala, who led the round, argues that the case for Valarian is that it sidesteps the classic defense startup trap—no production lines to blow up, no missiles to test. “If this company fails, it’s not going to be because they overspent on a production facility,” he said.

See you tomorrow,

Lily Mae Lazarus
X: @LilyMaeLazarus
Email: lily.lazarus@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS

– Ravee Optics, a Dayton, Ohio-based developer of laser communication systems designed for transporting data across satellite networks, raised $6 million in seed funding. BIG Capital led the round and was joined by JobsOhio Ventures and CincyTech.

IPOS

– Apnimed, a Cambridge, Mass.-based drug developer focused on sleep-related breathing diseases, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $120 million in revenue for the year ended March 31. Morningside, Alpha Wave Global, Shionogi, Columbia Fund, Tao, and Lawrence G. Miller back the company.

– Holtec Nuclear, a Camden, N.J.-based nuclear power generation company, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $989 million in revenue for the year ended March 31. Holtec Holdings backs the company.

– Tailored Brands, a New York City-based owner and operator of menswear retailers, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $2.6 billion in revenue for the year ended April 30. Silver Point Capital and Arbour Lane Capital Management back the company.

Fortune reached out to Blair Effron, a partner at Centerview Partners, which has advised the Murdoch family on investment decisions. He said, “As a friend of James, I’ll pass on speaking.”  A representative for James Murdoch had no comment at press time.

The financials are based on details of James’ holdings found in public records. 

A 2023 court case brought by a Tesla shareholder challenging Musk’s controversial $56 billion compensation package revealed that James had bought three separate tranches of stock in SpaceX. Two of those tranches, worth $50 million each, were acquired in 2019 and 2020 via a private investment firm, thought to be Murdoch’s Lupa Systems, where he is the primary beneficiary, along with staff and partners. He separately bought another $20 million as a personal investment in 2019. Those stakes together are now estimated to be worth between $6.573 billion and $7.44 billion, according to the Pitchbook estimate. 

While the SpaceX S-1 document attached to its public offering, doesn’t mention James Murdoch, it details stock awards to its chief financial officer, Bret Johnsen, that have an expiration date of 2030 and value the stock at $4.40—numbers that give clues as to the value of owned by shareholders before the IPO.

There are, however, a series of caveats. James Murdoch could have sold those SpaceX shares along the way, and there have been several dilutions. The company approved a five-to-one stock split in May, for instance. The precise dates of the stock acquisitions are not publicly known, but media industry executives have been exchanging rumors about the junior Murdoch’s astonishing potential windfall. 

The former chief executive of 21st Century Fox was already a multi-billionaire. He stepped down from Fox after the majority of its assets were sold in a $71.3 billion deal with Disney in 2019, garnering him $2.2 billion in proceeds. 

James’ split with his father became final when the elder Murdoch rejected him in favor of his brother Lachlan to succeed Rupert atop News Corp.

Last year, a Nevada probate court examined a move by Rupert and his eldest son Lachlan Murdoch to change a longstanding Murdoch Family Trust, which had been designed to protect the financial interests of all six Murdoch children. A probate commissioner ruled against the change that would have stripped voting rights from James and his sisters Liz and Prue. After an appeal, the parties came to an agreement that resulted in each of the three siblings receiving a $1.1 billion payout. The agreement stipulated that Murdoch children shed their stock in News Corp and Fox. 

The private fight spilled out into public view after the New York Times and The Atlantic revealed the full extent of the animosity between James Murdoch and his father. The two no longer speak. The Atlantic published an interview with James, who believed his father was feeding questions to a lawyer. One of the questions posed was, “Have you ever done anything successful on your own?” 

James first met Musk in the late nineties, according to the court filings in the shareholder fight. At that time, Musk was building Zip2, an online guide to cities and businesses for newspapers while James was running digital operations at what was then known simply as News Corp, before Fox split off.  The two men reconnected after James ordered an electric Tesla Roadster in the middle of the 2000s. They continued to meet up and went on family vacations to Israel, Mexico, and the Bahamas. After one of the trips, Musk talked to his brother Kimbal and later added James Murdoch to the Tesla board, according to an account in the court documents from the now-resolved compensation battle. 

James Murdoch has profited handsomely from his Tesla shares, which he holds within JRM Rev Trust and another financial entity called Seven Hills Trust. Tesla share sales have netted the JRM Rev Trust $107 million since Spring last year, according to SEC documents. Tesla also owns 19 million shares in SpaceX, potentially benefiting James Murdoch. There are Street rumors that Tesla may be folded into SpaceX too. 

James is currently listed as an independent director who joined Tesla in July 2017. 

The revelations give weight to the idea that James Murdoch has been a canny investor since his exit from Fox. Musk was spotted sitting with Rupert and daughter Liz Murdoch at the Super Bowl in 2023 and shared that he had discussed his Dogecoin initiatives. That was the year Rupert and Lachlan tried to figure out a way to change the irrevocable family trust to solidify Lachlan’s control over the companies, ostensibly to avoid disputes boiling over after Rupert passes away—a move that ultimately triggered the probate fight. 

James has been setting his own course since the Disney sale, establishing his own investment firm Lupa Systems in New York in 2019. That year, SpaceX began launching broadband satellites that became part of Starlink, a business that James Murdoch knows well, having run two satellite pay-TV ventures, Sky in the U.K. and Star in Asia. 

After exiting Fox, James began investing in a host of businesses both in the media and beyond. Most recently, he made a $300 million deal to acquire a large portion of Vox Media, owner of New York magazine, a brace of niche websites, and a collection of podcasts from the likes of tech journalist Kara Swisher and Professor Scott Galloway. 

He has made a host of other investments that span the arts, including comic book publisher and studio AWA; Tribeca Enterprises, the Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal-helmed Tribeca Film Festival owner; and MCH Group, the holding company of global art show Art Basel. James is also invested in a streaming media service joint venture in India through Bodhi Tree Systems, which received funds from Comcast and the Qatar Investment Authority. 

“To me this is no surprise, James has been a savvy global technology investor for decades,” said Jon Miller, the chief executive of TPG-backed Integrated Media. Miller is a former CEO of AOL and was the chief digital officer at News Corp overseeing Hulu.

Veteran media analyst Brian Wieser of media and marketing focused advisory firm Madison and Wall believes it’s very hard to say with certainty what the actual potential windfall might be but acknowledges it’s likely significant if James Murdoch bought shares at $4.40 in 2020 those shares, and the ones acquired in 2019 have grown 33x. 

He said: “Given that James Murdoch has been in the SpaceX orbit for a while, since Tesla, it’s unsurprising that he’s benefited financially. And if so, it’s very plausible that someone like James Murdoch could end up making a lot more from the holdings of SpaceX than they ever would from holding traditional media companies. Though that presumes they can get liquid, holding the shares doesn’t mean anything if you can’t sell them.”—With reporting by Amanda Gerut.

Claire Atkinson is the author of an upcoming new biography of Rupert Murdoch for Grand Central Publishing, scheduled to be published in 2027.

But she’s determined for the venture to stand on its own, with “no ties to my privilege or my last name,” Phoebe Gates told Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast in an episode published in February. 

“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy. 

Phoebe Gates’ comments came during the resurfacing of her father’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein, although representatives for Bill Gates have repeatedly denied his involvement and any related accusations. Phoebe Gates didn’t comment about the allegations, but French Gates earlier this year said her ex-husband “has to answer” for Epstein files mentions just weeks after it was revealed she had received $8 billion toward her philanthropic organization, Pivotal, as part of her divorce settlement.

Phoebe Gates did acknowledge her father’s business success, saying: “From my dad, I’ve really learned that your team is the core of what you’re building. You can’t do anything without an incredible team.”

How Phoebe Gates is paving her own path

Phoebe Gates cofounded Phia, an AI shopping assistant, with her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni. The shopping assistant plugs into browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and surface deals across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. It essentially serves as your own personal deal finder: Say you’re looking at a $200 dress from Anthropologie, Phia can find and compare prices at secondhand sellers to help customers find a better price. 

“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling. She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it,” Gates told Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor Emma Hinchliffe in April 2025.

This week, Bloomberg reported Phia’s browser extension had allegedly been claiming credit for online sales it didn’t drive, a practice known in affiliate marketing as “cookie stuffing.” According to Bloomberg, which tested the extension across more than 50 websites alongside Capital One Shopping and independent researcher Ben Edelman, Phia silently opened a background tab during checkout and injected its own referral code, overriding legitimate referrals from other publishers in violation of many affiliate networks’ policies.

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg the company was made aware within the prior 24 hours a recent code release “was causing misattributions from a subset of users” and said the issue had been fixed. Bloomberg retested the extension after contacting the company and found it had stopped automatically claiming the referral click.

The New York–based startup launched its app in 2025 and has grown quickly, garnering hundreds of thousands of downloads in its first months as investors pile into AI “agents” that automate digital tasks. A recent $35 million funding round led by Notable Capital, with participation from firms including Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, pushed Phia’s valuation to about $185 million less than a year after an initial $8 million seed round.​ 

Gates and Kianni first brainstormed startup ideas in their Stanford dorm room, cycling through concepts before landing on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her own mother) and Kianni’s sustainability focus. 

In line with Gates’ insistence she builds her own venture without the benefits of her last name, the young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture. 

Gates and Kianni have said the topic of their potential future children has come up in meetings before, which was understandably frustrating for the entrepreneurial duo. But French Gates—a women’s rights activist—gave Gates some stern advice: “Get up or get out the game.”

“We’ll have investors ask us all the time, ‘Well, what happens when you two go have babies?’ And I remember one time crying about that. I called my mom, and she was like, ‘Get up or get out the game, sis.’ I was like, damn,” Gates said on an episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast published in April 2025.

It’s now a saying Gates reminds herself of when navigating meetings with investors, all while attempting to buck any nepo baby accusations. This isn’t just another legacy project, Gates argues. 

“The chip on my shoulder is not only proving myself but building something, you know, novel and unique that consumers actually love,” she said.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on February 21, 2026.

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