The Numbers Behind the Surge

The $5.2 billion figure from 2024 was already a signal that European capital markets had absorbed the geopolitical shift. What followed confirmed it was not a spike. European defence startups raised €3.5 billion in 2025, nearly double the 2024 total. Defence, security, and resilience now account for 43% of all European deep tech funding. Nearly half of the continent's most ambitious capital is pointing at one sector.

The global picture amplifies the scale. Approximately $19 billion flowed into aerospace and defence startups in 2025, nearly double the $10 billion recorded in 2024. The United States drove significant volume, but European companies captured a growing share of that capital, both from domestic sources and from transatlantic investors who see European sovereign capability as an undervalued asset.

The Besemer Venture Partners 2026 defence tech roadmap projects that European defence spending will grow 3.4 times over the next six years. That projection is not extrapolation from peacetime trends. It reflects confirmed parliamentary budgets, NATO commitments, and a continent that has spent two years watching events in Ukraine and concluded that strategic dependency is a liability.

Capital follows urgency. European defence has both.

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Europe's New Unicorns

The most concrete proof that European defence tech has matured is the unicorn count.

TEKEVER is Europe's newest confirmed defence tech unicorn. The Portuguese company builds AI-driven unmanned aerial systems, with its AR5 maritime patrol drone now one of the most operationally deployed platforms in European coastal surveillance. TEKEVER previously raised €70 million led by Baillie Gifford, the Edinburgh-based investment manager better known for its early bets on Amazon and Tesla. That round was followed by a £400 million commitment to the United Kingdom, where the company is investing in AI-driven defence capability at scale. TEKEVER's trajectory is the template for European sovereign defence tech: founded outside the traditional prime contractor ecosystem, battle-tested in real operational environments, funded by patient institutional capital, and now deploying at national scale.

Quantum Systems, headquartered in Munich, reached unicorn status in the same cycle. Its Vector AI reconnaissance drones are operational in Ukraine. The German Bundeswehr ordered 520 Falke surveillance systems in a €210 million contract. In March 2026, Quantum Systems announced a contract to deliver 15,000 Strila interceptor drones to the Ukrainian National Guard, funded by the German government. The company's model is now the defining pattern in European defence tech: prove the technology in combat, then scale to NATO procurement.

Two unicorns in one funding cycle is not a coincidence. It is evidence that the European defence tech ecosystem has produced companies capable of operating at sovereign scale without American acquirers arriving first to capture the value.

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Where the Capital Is Going

The Bessemer Venture Partners 2026 defence tech roadmap identifies five frontiers shaping where capital is concentrating. Each one maps to a documented operational gap exposed by modern conflict.

Autonomous systems are attracting the largest share of investment. The drone economy that emerged from Ukraine demonstrated that unmanned platforms are not a niche capability; they are the dominant force-multiplier in contemporary warfare. Every European military is now in active procurement for autonomous air, ground, and maritime systems, and every serious defence tech investor has a thesis on which companies will supply them.

Sensing and intelligence come second. Modern sensors generate data faster than human analysts can process it. AI-driven fusion of satellite imagery, signals intelligence, acoustic detection, and drone video into real-time actionable intelligence is now an operational priority, not a research ambition. Quantum Systems' WASP-equipped Vector drones identify artillery positions at 15 kilometres. That capability defines the recce-strike complex that every NATO force wants to replicate.

Communications and resilience occupy the third frontier. Electronic warfare has re-emerged as a decisive battlefield factor. Jamming-resistant mesh networks, satellite-independent navigation, and adaptive countermeasure systems that update faster than adversaries can respond are the current engineering challenge. The companies solving it are attracting serious capital.

Directed energy is the fourth frontier. Laser and high-power microwave systems offer the potential to defeat drone swarms at scale without the per-shot cost that makes kinetic interceptors economically unsustainable at volume. European programmes in directed energy have accelerated significantly in the past 18 months.

Logistics and sustainment close the list. The unsexy work of keeping autonomous systems operational in contested environments, spare parts, battery logistics, firmware updates, forward-area maintenance, turns out to be where the real operational bottleneck sits. Companies solving defence supply chain problems at software speed are quietly accumulating contracts.

The European Investment Fund's deployment adds institutional depth to the private capital picture. In March 2026, the EIF committed €50 million to Join Capital Fund III, a vehicle focused on European deeptech and dual-use technology. That commitment is not the largest in the market, but it is a signal about how public capital is orientating around the dual-use thesis: technology with clear civilian applications that also carries genuine defence relevance, built by founders who don't have to choose between the two markets.

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The Founders at DTM26

Understanding where capital flows is one task. Understanding who is building the companies that receive it is another.

Ricardo Mendes, Co-Founder and CEO of TEKEVER, takes the stage at DTM26 as the clearest proof point of what sovereign European defence tech looks like at unicorn scale. Mendes built TEKEVER in Portugal, outside the established defence industrial corridors of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The company's route to unicorn status ran through operational deployment before institutional recognition: AR5 drones in service with multiple European coast guards before the Baillie Gifford round, real contracts before the valuation conversation. His appearance in Berlin is a direct statement about where European defence tech founders come from and what building outside the traditional prime contractor ecosystem actually produces.

Thomas Gottschild, Managing Director of MBDA Germany, joins Mendes on the DTM26 speaker roster. MBDA is Europe's largest missile systems manufacturer, a joint venture spanning Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo, with production capability across five nations. Gottschild represents the incumbent industrial perspective: what the established prime contractors see when they look at the startup ecosystem, where they are actively partnering, and how European defence industrialists are integrating new capabilities without ceding control of sovereign programmes.

David Chinn, Senior Partner at McKinsey and Company and co-leader of McKinsey's European Defence Mission, brings the strategic advisory view. Chinn has spent years at the intersection of government defence policy and industrial capability assessment. His analysis of where European defence spending is actually building capability, as opposed to where it is making political statements, is precisely the lens that investors and founders need when allocating time and capital across a market that moves faster than most public commentary acknowledges.

Ben Wallace, former Minister of State for Security in the United Kingdom, provides the policy and intelligence context. Wallace served during a period when British defence policy underwent significant rethinking, shaped by Brexit, the collapse of the INF treaty, and the early phases of the conflict in Ukraine. His read on where European strategic thinking has landed, and where it remains unresolved, frames the political environment in which every defence tech company is building.

These four speakers represent distinct vantage points. Founder, prime contractor, strategic advisor, former minister. The DTM26 defence track sessions are built around the intersection of those perspectives, on who is building, who is buying, and who is setting the rules under which both happen.

The full DTM26 defence programme spans procurement, dual-use investment, autonomous systems, and the emerging relationship between European startups and the continent's established defence industrial base.

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The Defence Track at [deeptech.build/markets/defence](https://www.deeptech.build/markets/defence)

Europe is not waiting to see how American defence tech develops and then adapting. It is building its own sovereign stack: its own AI for autonomous systems, its own sensing and communications infrastructure, its own production capacity for directed energy and next-generation munitions. The capital flowing into that effort in 2025 and early 2026 is not speculative. It is following signed contracts, confirmed parliamentary budgets, and the operational validation that combat deployment provides.

The companies at the front line of this effort are building in Berlin, Munich, Lisbon, Paris, and Warsaw. They are raising from European investors and deploying for European armed forces. The exits, when they come, need to be European exits. That is the industrial logic behind every conversation happening in this market right now.

DTM26 is where those conversations happen on record, with the founders, investors, and policy architects who are making the decisions that will define European sovereign defence for the decade ahead.

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Secure your place at DTM26 and join Ricardo Mendes, Thomas Gottschild, David Chinn, Ben Wallace, and 60+ speakers forging Europe's defence tech future in Berlin on 20 and 21 May.

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