Why We Invested: Quantum Systems – Engineering Europe’s Next-Gen Aerial Intelligence

Today we’ve announced our latest investment - backing Quantum Systems $160M round as the lead investor from Balderton’s growth fund.

Aerial intelligence is becoming the nervous system of modern security—and the UK & Europe, for the first time in a generation, are building and investing accordingly.

A once-in-a-generation budget shift

Across NATO, defense ministries have aligned around the importance of uncrewed systems. In the United Kingdom, a dedicated £4.5 billion, 10-year drone strategy is now live, complemented by the RAF’s new StormShroud electronic-attack drone programme. In the EU, a total defence spend of €100 billion has been earmarked for new capabilities—the largest share going to unmanned air and defense systems. Eighteen member states have already formed a joint procurement club for drone and counter-drone systems. In the US, the FY-25 DoD budget will shift roughly $50 billion from legacy kit into five priority areas—with drones and counter-drones chief among them - alongside a new directive to equip every army division with ~1,000 UAS by 2026.

In short, intelligence services and militaries on both sides of the Atlantic are voting with their wallets: uncrewed, software-defined airpower is now table-stakes.

The engineering edge

Quantum Systems sits at the centre of that shift. The Munich-based team pioneered fixed-wing electric VTOL long before the acronym became fashionable, and they have stayed at the technical edge of drone hardware and resilient supply-chains. However over the last couple of years, strengthened by advances in computer vision and Generative AI, they now lead with a software-edge as well. Because both the flight computer and the ground station software are proprietary, QS can push weekly OTA updates—a cadence that modern threats, whether domestic or international require and one that the big primes can only dream of.

Battle-proven, not brochure-ware

Over the last few years we have met 100s of great teams wanting to build dual-use technologies with a strong defense focus. But Quantum Systems are one of the few teams we’ve met that not only promised they could do it, they’ve proved it. When Ukraine requested mid-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support, Quantum Systems answered the call. Vector, their most popular drone format, has since logged thousands of combat sorties, its firmware iterated in near-real time from front-line feedback. That cycle—design in Munich, deploy in Mykolaiv, patch overnight—creates a data moat as formidable as anyone's.

Today, Germany, Spain, Australia and New Zealand field QS fleets, and several NATO units run the system under different designations. Those flight-hours translate directly into mean-time-between-failure metrics that new entrants will take years to replicate.

Put simply, the company is engineered for the realities of modern defence procurement: rapid scaling, full-stack control, and constant development.

Building responsibly

While we are not traditional defence investors, we have been studying and meeting dual-use applications that can stand on their own ( in QS’s case for use cases like disaster relief and critical-infrastructure inspection). But we knew if they were to be deployed in war, they had to have a leadership team obsessed with integrity and compliance as much as code. Florian Seibel, QS’s founder spent 15 years flying Tiger attack helicopters; he has seen, first-hand, what happens when technology outruns ethics. That mindset permeates the company—from export-control audits to granular end-user monitoring.

Catching lightning

As my partner Rana says in her post, venture capital is rarely about certainties, but every so often the macro tailwinds, the budget cycle and the right technical architecture line up to create lightning. With Quantum Systems, we believe the UK & Europe have the chance to build a home-grown defence prime whose products are as efficient and adaptable as any AI-breakthrough and as field-tested as any Cold War stalwart.