Uwe Horstmann and I started out as venture investors in Europe around the same time. He has a military background, and he was investing in defence years before it was obvious – honestly, before most of us would have taken the meeting. Then he stopped investing in it and went to build it.
We were the first to back him at inception and have tripled down every round since.
STARK is what he and
@jschaback built. A multi-domain neo-prime for European defence: inexpensive, AI-driven systems – from drones to unmanned boats and beyond across air, land and sea – designed from the first prototype to be mass-produced. Within 18 months of founding they had landed contracts worth billions, which
@gradypb notes is unheard of in this industry. They went from zero to 700 people in two years, most of them engineers.
Uwe’s view is that the real lesson of Ukraine isn’t drones. It’s the innovation ecosystem – soldiers giving feedback, talent willing to work in defence, capital, a robust supply chain, procurement that moves in months instead of years. Combat ready technology, from the real world.
The other thing is how close they stay to the user. The buyer is a general. The customer is a staff sergeant. STARK has a large team in Ukraine and shows up at the training grounds with a new version every couple of days. This feedback is critical. They take it, go back, and come back with something a little better. That is how you win trust with soldiers.
Johannes is an engineer’s engineer. He tells the story of a public test that didn’t go to plan, a frozen shooting range in November, three shifts around the clock, and the moment two weeks later when “from there on, we’ve always hit.”
A few things we cover:
– The four things STARK did right: innovate next to the battlefield, fund the R&D themselves, design for certification and mass deployment from day one, and make the factory part of the weapon. “Production is deterrence”
– Soldier-centricity: why soldiers wanted a wood box they could burn vs plastic, and what that taught the team about the lab vs. the field
– Europe’s mandate to step up on defence, and why its changes in procurement are structural, not a moment. Europe doesn’t change because of a charismatic leader; it changes when reality kicks in
– “As complex as a washing machine”: the edge a two-year-old company has over a 70-year-old prime
– Startups inside a startup: autonomous programs for maritime, aerial and strike systems, plus capability teams for GNSS-denied navigation, target re-identification and comms
– Sub-meter precision on a target moving at 60 km/h, and why it’s neither a hardware problem nor a software problem but both, tuned together down to the compute budget
– Born out of fire: the Virtus test that failed in public, and the four weeks that followed
– A single strike from launch to target: the operator sets the intent, the system plans around no-fly zones, the swarm shares what it sees, and the human stays in the loop where the customer wants them
– Where AI shows up: perception on the device, Minerva for mission planning, and NATO’s responsible-use principles as hard-coded safeguards
– The next hard problem isn’t a product. It’s contract design – building surge capacity into the contract the way you’d buy cloud, because that is where real deterrence comes from
0:00 – Introduction
1:03 – Billions in contracts in 18 months: Stark's four-part playbook
2:28 – The staff sergeant matters as much as the general, and wood beats plastic
7:42 – Why Europe is ready for a neo prime, and why procurement reform will last
11:45 – Startup DNA, venture-style programs, and "as complex as a washing machine"
16:27 – Born out of fire: the failed trial and the round-the-clock comeback
21:13 – Where Stark finds talent, and why defense is no longer off-limits
23:48 – Anatomy of a strike, from the wooden crate to the kill zone
27:22 – Vertical integration, multiple domains, and shifting left on manufacturing
32:53 – After the Hugging Face hack: guardrails on autonomous weapons
35:56 – Matching the primes on R&D and scaling to 700 people in two years
39:24 – Deterrence by contract, and Europe's next chapter with the US
