Stark Defence raises €500M at €3.5B valuation; Sequoia, Founders Fund back German kamikaze drone startup

Stark Defence, a Berlin-based autonomous drone and loitering munitions startup founded in 2024, raised approximately €500 million (roughly $570 million) in a Series C funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, valuing the company at over €3.5 billion. Additional investors include the NATO Innovation Fund, Döpfner Capital, Air Street Capital, 201 Ventures, Project A, and Advent International. The round roughly triples Stark's valuation in five months and brings total funding since founding to approximately €640 million, with over 80% earmarked for research and manufacturing.

Stark's flagship product is the Virtus, a long-range loitering munition with over 130 km range that can remain airborne for up to 90 minutes, autonomously identify and strike targets, and operate without human-in-the-loop in terminal phase. The system is already deployed operationally in Ukraine. In February 2026, the German Bundeswehr awarded Stark and competitor Helsing contracts valued at approximately €269 million each to supply drones to NATO units in Lithuania, with framework agreements potentially expanding to €1 billion per company. The company operates a 40,000-square-foot production facility in Swindon, England, with operations across Germany, Ukraine, Sweden, and Greece.

For architects: this round underscores how geopolitical rearmament is accelerating autonomous systems procurement and valuation curves. Europe's special defense funds and procurement accelerations (Germany's defence fund, the EU's ReArm Europe plan) are driving venture and industrial capital at unprecedented scale into defense autonomy. Stark's challenge is scaling production from prototype to "thousands of systems per month" to meet military demand. The €3.5B valuation in under two years reflects investor conviction that autonomous strike drones will become commoditized and deployed at scale.