There are moments when the world splits in two. One side is everything we know—our routines, our relationships, our illusions of safety. The other is a blank space, the part of the map marked “here be monsters.” Illness will do that. So will grief. So will watching someone you love drift away, slowly, while sitting right in front of you.

In the latest episode of Keep Going, I spoke with actor and technologist Justice Leak about his experience caring for his mother after she was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s. This wasn’t a theoretical conversation. This was personal. It was about faith, patience, and trying to hold on to something slippery and sacred: the self, or what’s left of it, in another person.

Keep Going: These Boots Were Made For Walking

John Biggs · Jul 21

We talk a lot on Keep Going about mental health. About reinvention. About trying again when everything feels broken. But this week, something deeper came through.

Read full story

Justice’s story wasn’t about a miracle cure. It wasn’t about a quick fix. It was about the long, strange path he walked to give his mom something like clarity during her descent into confusion. Through careful use of psilocybin, sound, movement, and intention, he saw moments of light break through the fog of her illness. Not a reversal, but a reprieve.

This is not medical advice. This is advice on how to keep going when someone you love is slipping away...

When Max Buchan launched Valarian in 2020, he wasn’t building the next messaging app or enterprise dashboard. He was building infrastructure—systems that sit under the surface of apps, institutions, and, more recently, battlefields.

Valarian didn’t start as a defense company. It started as an enterprise software venture aimed at helping organizations control where and how their data moved. But the world changed, fast. Brexit exposed new tensions around jurisdiction. Ukraine reminded us that sovereignty isn’t a metaphor. And suddenly, the demand for what Valarian was offering—actual, operational digital control—moved from the boardroom to the front line.

On this week’s Startup Show, Max joined me to talk about how Valarian went from fintech roots to working with NATO governments, deploying secure infrastructure in the field, and raising money from top defense investors like Scout Ventures and Artis.

From Crypto to Compartmentalization

Max cut his teeth at CoinShares, a crypto asset manager that scaled from a tiny team to a publicly traded company. There, he saw firsthand how fragmented and vulnerable digital infrastructure can be—especially across borders. That experience, combined with the geopolitical shifts of the last few years, shaped his thesis: the next era of sovereignty would be digital.

Valarian’s core product is called Acra. It's a portable, containerized backend that enterprises and governments can deploy locally, on demand. In enterprise use cases, that means secure internal communication and controlled data flow. In defense contexts, it means spinning up a network in minutes—sometimes from a Pelican case in hostile terrain.

You don’t just own the encryption keys. You own the system.

The Infrastructure Under the Infrastructure

Acra looks less like an app and more like a replicated backend system. It runs databases, object stores, and secure communication protocols—everything you’d need to build on top of, without ever touching public infrastructure. It’s generative on deployment, meaning each instance is unique. Not even Valarian has access to customer deployments.

That idea—zero external visibility—matters. Especially when you're talking about military communications or sensitive research environments. “Visibility is the threat,” Max told me. “Just revealing who’s talking to whom can compromise an operation.”

Dual-Use, Real Stakes

The company now operates in two tracks: Valarian Enterprise, which serves clients like banks and pharma companies, and Valarian Defense, which handles secure deployments for NATO member states.

Their customers are using Acra to do everything from run compartmentalized AI workloads to spin up isolated networks in the field. Some want the system to be thermite-compatible—able to self-destruct in a crisis. Others just want to ensure their proprietary data stays in one jurisdiction and doesn’t get copied into someone else’s cloud.

That flexibility—running one system in a bank, another in a war zone—is what makes Valarian stand out in a space where most infrastructure is either too lightweight or too rigid.

What Europe Needs Now

Max is blunt about the state of defense tech in Europe. While budgets are growing, capability isn’t always keeping pace. The U.S., he says, has built a far more responsive innovation ecosystem. Companies like Palantir and Anduril have shown that dual-use startups can thrive when the government is ready to work with them.

Europe’s challenge isn’t just funding. It’s culture.

“We’re more risk-averse,” Max said. “But that’s changing. People here want to buy British software. The problem is, there hasn’t been much to buy—until now.”

Valarian wants to be part of that shift: not just building defense tech, but helping shape a sovereign, scalable digital infrastructure that Europe can call its own.

What’s Next

Valarian is hiring. They’re scaling fast to meet demand across enterprise and defense. They’re also looking at acquisitions—adding capabilities that fit into their secure-by-default architecture.

From fintech to the field, Valarian’s path shows what happens when you treat sovereignty not as a slogan, but as a product spec.

Learn more at valarian.com.