Stark opens its first UK drone factory
German startup takes a big step forward in its production and ties into how the country is supporting Ukraine, and re-arming itself
Three weeks after its drone demo for the UK military ended in a crash, German startup Stark is marching onward. Today, the company — backed by $100 million from investors that include Sequoia and NATO — opened ts first production facility in the UK, in the town of Swindon in England.
Swindon has an iconic place in the history of UK defence: it was central to the development and manufacturing of the Spitfire fighter plane. Now, a new kind of aircraft will be built there. Stark will focus initially on building its flagship Virtus loitering munition, as well as a newer one-way effector that Stark did not name.
While a lot of defence startups out of the UK and Europe are looking further East and West as they grow, the focus for high-tech Stark remains squarely in the Old World. The 40,000-square foot space opened today is Stark’s third factory overall, after a primary facility in Germany and second in an undisclosed location in Ukraine — like the UK, both also customers of the company. Stark is expected to create at least 100 jobs in the area through the Swindon facility, the company said.
The opening is coming at a key moment in UK defence.
It was just yesterday that Helsing, another German startup, also opened its first factory in the UK.
That facility, in Plymouth, will focus on maritime hardware and software, specifically a underwater glider that Helsing is building with BlueOcean, a startup it acquired this year. Helsing is a direct competitor to Stark, and it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the two held events just 24 hours apart broadcasting their physical stake in UK ground.
But there is possibly bigger timing significance for the two events that is more important than schoolyard rivalry. They come at a time when the UK is trying to ramp up its defence profile, which will include inking procurement deals with the likes of Stark and Helsing; spinning up new factories and operations, such as the 13 new “factories of the future” that were designated yesterday to produce munitions and and energetics; and other efforts to improve the rest of its infrastructure.
“This supports our armed forces and strengthens our national security, but more than that, it boosts the wider economy through investment, jobs, and the creation of dual-use technologies,” Rupert Pearce, the new National Armaments Director, said at the event today, his first public appearance since taking on the new role. “This is what we call the defence dividend.”
Indeed, while the UK is focusing on how to rebuild its own capabilities, it’s also looking further afield. The country has become a major supplier of support to Ukraine in its war with Russia, and getting the new wave of defence tech companies set up in the UK — even if they are not British companies — can be considered potentially in aid of both of those efforts.
(Stark did not specify how much of its work for the UK government feeds directly into UK efforts, and how much goes to Ukraine, but Phil Lockwood, Stark’s MD for international, said in an interview that it did both.)
If Stark faced a hit to its public image when its drones crashed in Kenya in the demo three weeks ago, today’s event in Swindon appeared to be aimed at rehabilitating that.
The programme prominently included an off-the-record debrief on the Kenya incident, where a senior official for the company talked through the details of what exactly happened — complete with pictures and graphics — to a room full of hundreds of people, a majority of them serving military. Attention was rapt, and the company leaned in, making a point of owning what happened and if anything, taking a page from how military has developed over the years, and how startups work, and highlighting the process of iteration.
The question that people have been asking him, new CEO Uwe Horstmann said today, is “why did two of your drones crash?” His answer, he said, was to correct them. “We didn’t crash two drones,” he said happily. “We’ve crashed hundreds of drones in the past few months!”
Be that as it may, it’s a cost Stark is willing to bear, and one military attendant at the event told me that was almost more important, given that everyone has crashes, except that when this happens with primes, “they charge you” to fix the problems.
Still, the UK still has a fairly tall order ahead of it. The Strategic Defence Review, published earlier this year, set out a long list of priorities for the UK, but many continue to question how the Ministry of Defence will finance this new age of defence future. More partnerships with a wider list of deep pocketed companies could be one way to approach that. In the words of Al Carns MP and Minister for the Armed Forces, noted today, the opening today is one example of SDR fulfilment “in action.”