Well, jeez. We thought Quantum Systems was already having quite the year—turns out we didn’t know the half of it.
This morning, the German autonomy giant announced that it’s raised a $1.2B Series D at a $8B valuation, co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent.
- BOND, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Wellington Management, A.P. Moller Holding, and Elephant Lake Ventures, as well as longtime backers Balderton and HV Capital, were also on the cap table.
The company says it will use the money to “accelerate the transition from individual uncrewed platforms to an interoperable family of systems connected through MOSAIC UXS,” the company’s C2 for autonomous systems, and deepen their partnership with Airbus (announced earlier this month).
According to reporting by the Financial Times, the company will also potentially use the cash to merge with Stark, the company’s attack drone sister company, which just raised a cool €500M ($570M) last week.
“We are building a next generation neo-prime that has the potential to disrupt defence as we know it today,” co-founder and co-CEO Florian Seibel said in a statement. “We are profitable, deployed around the world and with the latest financing round we now have more than $1.2Bn of dry powder to execute.”
Zeitenwende, baby.
Alles gut: Quantum Systems has been making a ton of news lately, so you’ll be familiar.
- The company was founded by a team led by Seibel back in 2015 and set out—initially—to build drones that could “redefine how aerial data is collected, analysed, and turned into action.” (Read: ISR.)
- The company is now led by Seibel and co-CEO Sven Kruck, who joined the team in 2022.
- And they’ve been on a bit of a speed run, funding-wise: Last year, the company raised a €160M ($186M) Series C and a €180M ($209M) Series C extension, both led by Balderton Capital. Then, in February, they scored another €150M ($178M) in financing, and now this.
Mo’ money, fewer problems: STARK was founded as a kind of spin-out of the company by Seibel back in 2024, because, basically, a bunch of Quantum’s investors didn’t want to build weapons.
- With this new “dry powder,” Seibel told the FT that they were basically able to buy out anyone who wasn’t comfortable with the whole pew-pew lethal side of things. Those who did not “feel comfortable with the potentially new alignment of the company had a chance here to exit,” he said. Turns out money can, in fact, fix most problems.
Killer lineup: Even without STARK on board, Quantum has a pretty impressive roster of autonomous systems.
- There are the OG bread-and-butter ISR drones, including Vector, Trinity, Twister, and Reliant.
- They’ve pushed into the interceptor game in the past year through a partnership with Ukrainian company WIY Drones. They’ve also got their own model called Jager.
- A few weeks back, the company also announced that it’s building a mega-drone called PULSE P19 (think tiny little drone plane).
- And they’ve also made moves into ground autonomy with the acquisition of autonomous trucking company FERNRIDE and partnerships with Ukrainian UGV producer Tencore and trucking giant Daimler.
And if the merger does happen, Stark would bring over its loitering munitions (Virtus and Cascade), as well as its Gambit quadcopter and Vanta USV.
Not a bad lineup.
Scale up: It sounds like the name of the game—as it often is when you’re raising literal billions of dollars—is scale.
- Quantum says it will use the money to “expand production capacity, strengthen supply chain resilience, scale delivery across allied markets and continue investing in software and AI capabilities.”
“This financing unlocks our next phase of growth as we industrialise our multi-domain platform, scale production across allied markets and continue investing in the technology infrastructure that defines our long-term competitive position,” Quantum Systems CFO Jonas Jarosch said in a statement.