Why We Built Janus Capital

For most of my life, European security was something we were free to take for granted. It sat quietly in the background — assumed, unpriced, someone else's responsibility. That assumption is over. The last few years have made something plain that a generation of peace had let us forget: security is not a given. It is built, defended, and paid for — or it is lost.

Janus Capital was born from that realisation.

Defence is no longer optional

For decades, defence was treated as a discretionary line — a cost to be minimised, a sector to be avoided, something faintly uncomfortable to talk about at all. That framing has collapsed. A war returned to the European continent. Supply chains once considered secure were revealed as fragile. Technologies invented on the battlefield began reshaping entire industries in months, not decades. And Europe, almost overnight, committed to the largest rearmament since the Cold War.

What changed is not merely the budget. It is the understanding. Defence is now recognised for what it always was — the foundation everything else stands on. Prosperity, innovation, sovereignty, the freedom to build a normal life: none of it survives without the capacity to defend it. Backing that capacity is no longer a moral grey area. It is a necessity, and increasingly, a duty.

We do not see defence as a sector to profit from. We see it as the thing that makes every other sector possible.

What Janus is about

We built Janus to put serious, disciplined capital behind the companies defending Europe — and to do it properly. We focus on defence, security and dual-use technology: unmanned systems, electronic warfare, secure communications, critical-infrastructure protection, and the industrial base that produces them. These are the capabilities that decide modern conflicts, and Europe cannot afford to import them.

We are based in Riga, on NATO's eastern flank — deliberately. This is where the demand is most urgent, the engineering talent is most battle-tested, and the ground truth is closest. Proximity is not sentiment; it is an information advantage. It lets us understand what actually works before we commit a single euro.

How we invest

Conviction without discipline is just risk. So we pair deep technical understanding with institutional rigour. We do our own diligence on the technology itself — not just the spreadsheet — because in this sector the two cannot be separated. We treat governance, export-control and sanctions compliance not as friction but as the very thing that makes a sensitive industry investable. And we back a focused set of companies through the full investment cycle, standing beside founders rather than chasing quick exits.

This is a field that rewards patience, judgement, and a clear conscience. We intend to bring all three.

The road ahead

Europe is choosing, at last, to take its own security seriously. That choice will define the next decade — and it will be built, company by company, by the people willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of making the continent defensible again.

Janus Capital exists to back those people. That is the whole of our mission, and it is enough.

Antons Kreslins
Chief Executive Officer, Janus Capital