The New Defense Post #5

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Defense Tech Valley 2025 isn’t your typical defense conference. Forget polished booths, endless slide decks, and suits — this is about real battlefield urgency and startup speed.

Picture a massive warehouse packed with drones, UGVs, engineers in hoodies, and soldiers fresh from the front lines, giving raw feedback. This year, over 5,000 people showed up—triple last year’s crowd—including founders, VCs, military officers, and frontline operators.

It wasn’t clean or quiet, but that’s the point: DTV is about showcasing what works now in the frontline. Read the full article on The New Defense Post.

​Join us on November 17, 2025, in Berlin, to connect with investors, industry experts, and decision-makers and accelerate the next wave of defense innovation!

Sign up here: https://lu.ma/new-defense-summit-2025

​​A one-day conference designed for teams with working prototypes ready to scale. Learn how to secure capital, win contracts, and navigate regulation.

​Unlike large generalist conferences, the New Defense Summit is deliberately small and curated.

​Instead of endless panels, the program will feature short pitches, lightning talks, and hands-on workshops—formats designed to deliver real value.

​Instead of rushed networking breaks, we dedicate ample time for genuine conversations that spark partnerships, contracts, and long-term collaboration.

Context: Ukraine plans to deploy ~5 million drones in 2025, with fast procurement cycles that are expected to accelerate battlefield innovation. Swarmer is part of the Brave1 defense cluster and targets Ukraine and NATO-aligned customers.

🗣 CEO Serhii Kupriienko: “This funding enables us to scale and offer advanced swarming capabilities to every unmanned vehicle… Western democracies should deploy as many drones and robots as they can produce—without being constrained by the number of trained pilots.” (Business Wire)

📰 Our Take: This round shows software-first, hardware-agnostic autonomy as one of the scaling paths for mass deployment of drones. It's also a strong signal for Ukraine’s defense tech sector: larger rounds are now possible, and capital is beginning to flow in.

So far, investment hasn’t matched the traction and advancement of Ukrainian startups — but this could mark the beginning of a major turnaround.

It’s also a big win for Brave1, Ukraine’s defense tech cluster, which continues to roll out an impressive number of high-quality companies.

🗣 CEO Lorenz Meier: “The future of warfare is software-defined, unmanned, and at scale… advantage comes from autonomous mass, not individual drones.” (Auterion)

📰 Our Take: Their product makes a lot of sense — take any drone, add their AI module, and you have an autonomous system. With an abundance of drone designs, this seems like a solid building block for various platforms. It also makes sense to harmonize it across models—like Microsoft did for PC’s OS.

The real questions now are which approach to battlefield autonomy will work in the field, and at what price point and thus scale: competitors like The Fourth Law claim that they can reach much lower price points for drone autonomy modules.

🗣 EU official: Europe’s defence posture is “too fragmented”; this is an area where “we really need to see much more co-ordination.” (Financial Times)

📰 Our Take: The repeated violations of NATO airspace have been a wake-up call for member countries, as we are not currently in a position to effectively counter a mass drone attack originating from Russia.

The best experts at taking down Russian Shaheds are, without a doubt, the Ukrainians. At least in the short term, purchasing drone interceptors from them and receiving training from their air defense units seems like the most sensible move.

In the long term, we should develop homegrown, low-cost air defense systems such as directed-energy weapons, drone-based interceptors, and small-sized missiles.

In 2024, drones accounted for 69% of strikes on Russian troops and 75% of strikes on vehicles/equipment (Reuters)

A number of interesting people and companies showcased their products at Defense Tech Valley in Lviv; a few were as prominent as Stark. A company that, in less than 2 years, managed to get $100mn in funding from top VCs like the legendary Sequoia Capital, and deploy their products in Ukraine.

We sat down with Stark’s spokesperson for a quick chat about Stark’s history in Ukraine and a hint about their future strategy.

Could You Give an Overview of What Stark Is Doing—Especially in Ukraine—And a Bit of Its Story?

The idea for Stark emerged at the Munich Security Conference last year when we saw clear demand from Ukraine and European allies for weaponized drones. A small group of people, including our CTO, Johannes Schaback, and Quantum Systems founder, Florian Seibel, among others, formed STARK that summer to develop unmanned weapon systems and the software to remotely control them.

From day one, we built a Ukraine-based team that tests systems in the field daily and feeds operator feedback straight to our engineers in Germany. We design for real military operators, and our most important mission remains supporting Ukraine and delivering for NATO markets.

How Did You Secure Top-Tier Funding, and What’s Next?

We flew our first system in under ten months, and it has been tested and deployed on the frontline. The focus now is scaling and broadening our offerings (longer/shorter ranges, larger/smaller payloads, and entering new domains). For users in Ukraine, we use Ukrainian warheads. In Germany, we’re building a 100% European supply chain—including a warhead from TDW, a subsidiary of MBDA Germany.

Our goal is to offer a fully certified system for European needs by 2027, and we’re investing up front in production and warheads to prevent deliveries from slipping further into the future.

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