Victor Cobos and the Case for Investing in Europe's Resilience

Much of Europe's debate about strategic autonomy happens in policy papers. Victor Cobos has chosen to work on it through companies.

Cobos is the co-founder and president of Avantgard Group, a Madrid-based investment and corporate finance platform set up in the third quarter of 2025. Its focus is frontier technologies and the industries Europe depends on for its resilience: critical minerals, advanced materials processing, naval engineering, and data, energy and space infrastructure.

Advisory work across borders

Through Avantgard Capital, the group's advisory arm, Cobos has led engagements with Norge Mineraler in Norway, which is developing phosphate, vanadium and titanium resources for European critical-minerals supply chains. He has also advised Eikonoklastes Therapeutics, a US and Spanish biotech advancing ET-101, a gene therapy for ALS, as it establishes a European subsidiary in San Sebastián, Spain.

Metals, naval engineering and maritime security

Within the group's own portfolio, he sits on the board of Ecoguard Energy in Spain, whose environmentally friendly closed-loop copper technology aims to cut refining time from 28 days to five hours. He is also president of Bernico Vanguard, a Belgian naval engineering company whose 52R interceptor has been recorded at more than 100 knots, and which also develops fast unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for the Belgian Navy.

At BlueShadow in Denmark, another portfolio company, he serves on the board of a business that delivers technology-enabled maritime security solutions that fuse information, predict threats and deploy autonomous systems to stop attacks. Its hybrid threat prediction solution is already in service in the Baltic and North Seas. BlueShadow is now preparing two further services. The first, developed with Ukrainian defence partners, will protect Ukraine's Odesa coast from strike drone attacks. The second, a security escort service using autonomous unmanned surface vessels, will protect merchant ships from piracy and drone attacks on high-risk routes such as the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Hormuz.

The wider group also currently includes We Are Mi6, a Spanish creative strategy and investment-readiness agency, and Claymont Vanguard in France, which works on data, energy and space infrastructure.

Early recognition

Recognition has come early. FDI Insider named Avantgard Group "Most Innovative Technology Investment Group in Europe 2026" and Bernico Vanguard "Most Innovative Naval Engineering Firm in Belgium 2026".

The thread running through the portfolio, as the group describes it, is European competitiveness and technological sovereignty: the view that Europe needs to own more of the technology and supply chains it relies on, and that long-term, cross-border capital is needed to build them.

Company details are as provided to The Platinum Capital.