Stark's founders on building a European defence 'neo-prime': billions in contracts in 18 months and 'production is deterrence'
What's the story? On Sequoia Capital's Training Data podcast, partners Pat Grady and Luciana Lixandru interview Stark CEO Uwe Horstmann and CTO Johannes Schaback. The Berlin-based company, about two years old, calls itself a multi-domain "neo-prime" for European defence: inexpensive, AI-driven unmanned systems across air, land and sea, from strike drones to uncrewed boats, designed from the first prototype to be mass-produced. Grady notes it landed billions of dollars in contracts within 18 months of founding, which he calls unheard of in the industry, and it has grown from zero to about 700 people, most of them engineers.
The playbook: Horstmann names four things Stark did right. It innovates close to the battlefield, through a large team in Ukraine and work with European forces. It is "venture first", funding product development itself rather than relying on government R&D budgets. It designs for certification, validation and mass deployment by NATO forces from day one. And it treats the factory as part of the weapon: "production is deterrence." Visiting operational experts told the team its systems are "about as complex as a washing machine", which Horstmann says is exactly the point, because scaling from a thousand units a month to ten thousand is then doable.
Close to the user: The founders say the buyer is a general but the customer is a staff sergeant. Stark shows up at training grounds with a new version every few days; soldiers preferred a wooden crate they could burn over a plastic one. Schaback recounts the publicly reported failed trial of its Virtus system, after which engineers worked round-the-clock shifts at a freezing test range until they landed three consecutive hits within weeks. Internally Stark runs 10 to 15 programmes like a venture portfolio on a shared capability platform, with NATO's principles of responsible AI use hard-coded into its autonomy stack.
The numbers ahead: Horstmann says Stark intends to invest something like EUR 600 million over the next 12 to 36 months in R&D and production capacity, which he argues is not far off the self-funded core R&D of Europe's big primes. His next idea is contract design: defence contracts built like cloud contracts, with pre-agreed surge capacity, "because that is where the real deterrence comes from."
Worth knowing: Sequoia is a Stark investor; Lixandru says it backed Horstmann at inception and has invested in every round since. Contract and spending figures are as stated by the founders and hosts.
Source: Training Data podcast (YouTube), Luciana Lixandru on X
