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.

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.

Justice Leak—an actor, a seeker, and now the founder of Therapod—joined the podcast to talk about his mother, her Alzheimer's, and the way psychedelics changed their lives. Not in theory. Not in some lab. In a small town in Georgia, on a hot afternoon, with a handful of mushrooms and a prayer.

Justice wasn’t a psychonaut. He wasn’t raised in a culture of altered states. His mother sure as hell wasn’t. She was a third-grade teacher, a Christian, a Southern woman who never drank, never did drugs, and certainly never imagined herself in a “non-ordinary state of consciousness.”

But life has a way of closing doors until the only way forward is through one you never expected.

When his mom started to lose her sense of self—first her words, then her visual awareness, then her memory—Justice saw something terrifying: her waking life began to look like his own worst trip. The kind where you can’t tell what’s real, where rooms distort and shapes dissolve, where your own mind becomes the enemy.

And that’s when he realized: maybe these states weren’t just for introspection or trauma work. Maybe, just maybe, psychedelics could help rebuild the brain. Not just to feel better, but to function better.

So he did the thing you’re not supposed to do. He gave his mom mushrooms. Two and a half grams of psilocybin, ground up and put in capsules. No trippy music. No festival. Just a prayer and a garden.

The next day, she woke up singing. The stutter was gone. She was dressed. She was moving. It was temporary, sure—but it happened. And it kept happening. Each time they did a session, something came back. Not forever. But enough to keep going.

And here’s where the story gets bigger.

Because Justice realized the biggest hurdle wasn’t the medicine. It was the setting. These experiences didn’t belong in sterile clinics or chaotic forests. His mom needed a safe, beautiful, responsive space—one that supported the brain during this window of growth. One without disorienting floor reflections, with sounds tuned to 40 Hz, with curves and colors instead of walls and edges.

So he built it. Therapod. A new kind of therapeutic environment. Bio-adaptive, sensory-rich, and designed specifically for non-ordinary states. Think immersive art meets neuroscience. Think DMT trip meets nature-inspired architecture. Think real-time emotional feedback—without a word spoken.

Justice is still developing the tech, working with wearables that track emotional states through the body, feeding back into the room in real-time. But the mission is clear: if this medicine is going to reach people like his mom, it has to be more than molecules. It has to be infrastructure.

You can’t just hand someone psilocybin and hope. You need a room. A ritual. A reason. And someone to sit with you.

This episode left me shaken. Not just because it was moving, but because it made me ask: what if we’re underbuilding for the future we claim to believe in?

Justice isn’t selling trips. He’s building rooms for people on the edge—of memory, of function, of life itself. He’s doing what no clinical trial can. He’s showing what love looks like when you’ve run out of options.

You can learn more at experiencetherapod.com. But the real story is this: the next frontier of healing isn’t just the brain. It’s where the brain meets the world. And maybe—if we get it right—where the brain meets the end.