Two years ago Stark did not exist. Today it is worth €3.5 billion, holds a roughly €269 million order from the German armed forces, runs a production line in Swindon and operations stretching into Sweden, Greece and Ukraine, and has just raised €500 million to spend, more than 80 per cent of it on buildings and the people inside them. The round was backed by Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, Project A, Air Street Capital, 201 Ventures, Advent and Döpfner Capital, which is a lot of names for what is, underneath, a single bet: that the bottleneck in European defence is no longer ideas, it is factories.

The valuation curve alone tells the story of how fast this sector has reset. Sequoia led a round last August that valued Stark at around $500 million. An unannounced raise early this year pushed it past €1 billion. This one roughly triples that again, less than a year later, and takes the company’s total funding past €660 million, up from something like €160 million before. Companies do not normally quadruple in a year on merit. They do it when a continent decides, all at once, that it has a problem it is willing to overpay to fix.

The interesting part is not the weapon, it is the line

Stark builds loitering munitions, the military’s term for a drone that hovers over an area, finds a target on its own, and destroys it by flying into it. Its flagship, Virtus, is a long-range model pitched to strike up to 130km away in places where GPS has been jammed, and the company says it can be assembled in about ten minutes. Around it Stark has stacked a fuller catalogue than a two-year-old has any business owning: smaller man-portable strike drones, an unmanned surface vessel for the water, and a command system to coordinate the lot from one ground station. CEO Uwe Horstmann put the thesis in one line: “The challenge facing Europe is no longer whether we can innovate, it’s whether we can scale.” More than 80 per cent of this raise goes straight into R&D and manufacturing, including new electronic-warfare research facilities and lines meant to turn out thousands of systems a month.

That is precisely the muscle Europe has historically lacked. The continent is full of clever defence engineering and short of the industrial capacity to mass-produce it, which is the exact gap a half-billion-euro cheque is meant to close. The demand signal is no longer subtle. The EU’s ReArm Europe plan aims to mobilise up to €800 billion in defence spending across four years, and global defence-tech venture funding hit roughly $49 billion in 2025, close to double the year before. Germany’s military, for its part, has been moving with un-German haste, awarding initial drone contracts to Stark and Munich rival Helsing, with framework agreements that could climb toward €1 billion per company.

A founder who left, an investor who is politically radioactive

The people around Stark are as revealing as the products. It was co-founded by Florian Seibel, who had already built the German drone company Quantum Systems, and who has since stepped back to a founding-investor role. Horstmann, who took over as CEO last October, is a co-founder of the Berlin venture firm Project A, which is also in this round, and a reserve officer in the German armed forces, which is a useful résumé line when your customer is the Bundeswehr. The competitive set is the uncomfortable part. Seibel’s own Quantum Systems, the more operationally mature firm, raised €340 million last year, and Helsing, with deeper AI woven through its platform, is reportedly raising around $1.5 billion at an $18 billion valuation. Three German firms are now fighting over the same contracts, the same engineers, and the same capital.

There is a political wire running through all of it. Founders Fund means Peter Thiel, and Thiel’s involvement has been sensitive enough in Germany that, ahead of a parliamentary vote on the drone contracts, the defence ministry reportedly reassured lawmakers his stake sat below ten per cent. After this round, by Bloomberg’s account, his share has fallen further, with the majority held by the founders and employees and the rest spread across roughly fifty investors. The deal cleared. The capital kept coming. Whatever the discomfort, nobody was willing to be the one who slowed down the country’s fastest-arming drone maker.

The risk is the obvious one, and it is real: defence demand is a political weather system, and weather changes. A 2024-founded company that reaches unicorn status inside a year and then quadruples past it has the unmistakable shape of froth, and scaling production to the volumes defence ministries actually require is a thing Stark has promised but not yet proven. Set against that is a receipt that is hard to wave away. A German company, founded in 2024, a roughly €269 million state order, a deployed product flying in Ukraine, factories across three countries, and half a billion euros to scale them.