STARK Defence €500M Series C: Europe's First Autonomous Strike Prime

On 23 June 2026, STARK Defence closed a €500 million Series C at a valuation of approximately €3.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, in a round led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, with participation from the NATO Innovation Fund. The Berlin company, founded in 2024, holds a €269 million Bundeswehr contract for its Virtus loitering munition to equip a German armoured brigade in Lithuania, and unveiled two further systems in June, the Cascade tube-launched loitering munition and the Gambit man-portable quadcopter. The combination of Silicon Valley capital, NATO institutional endorsement, and a German sovereign anchor contract marks STARK as the first European autonomous strike company to assemble the institutional stack that has defined American defence-technology incumbents.