TL;DRBerlin drone startup Stark Defence raised €500M led by Sequoia and Founders Fund, pushing its valuation past €3.5 billion just two years after founding.
Stark Defence, the Berlin-based strike drone startup founded in 2024, has raised €500 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The deal values the company at more than three and a half billion euros, roughly triple the €1 billion mark it crossed earlier this year. Other investors in the round include the NATO Innovation Fund, Döpfner Capital, Air Street Capital, 201 Ventures, and Project A.
The round makes Stark one of the best-funded defence tech startups in Europe. The company has now raised more than €660 million in total, according to Bloomberg, up from approximately €160 million before this latest injection. More than 80 percent of the new capital will go toward manufacturing and research expansion.
Stark builds loitering munitions, the military term for drones that hover over a target area, identify threats autonomously, and destroy them by self-detonating on impact. Its flagship product, the Virtus, has been deployed in Ukraine and can be assembled in ten minutes. The company operates in Germany, Ukraine, Sweden, and Greece, and opened a 40,000-square-foot production facility in Swindon, England, last year.
