European defence tech has reached a frenzy with VCs — and it’s made raising money fairly smooth for startups like German battlefield integration software startup Project Q.
“Funds are accessible,” Leonard Wessendorff, CEO and cofounder of Project Q, tells Sifted. Founded last year, the startup has raised €7.5m in funding — across a pre-seed investment from a German family office in 2024, and a new seed round led by Berlin-based VC Project A, with Poland’s Expeditions Fund and Estonia’s SuperAngel joining.
Berlin-headquartered Project Q is building an interoperable software platform which integrates sensors to create real-time situational awareness for military personnel. It can, for example, combine radar optronics, computer vision and acoustic signals to alert troops on the ground of incoming drones or to help protect objects in the battlefield, Wessendorff explains.
“We have never lived in a time where you had so much real-time data on the battlefield, which is not coming from conventional military systems,” Wessendorff says. Existing solutions are “often very siloed and don’t really recognise fast developments on the battlefield,” he adds. “That was the beginning of Q.”
The startup’s name was originally just a placeholder, but it stuck. Wessendorff says the team also liked its relation to the fictional James Bond inventor, Q.
Though Wessendorff comes from a consulting background, he is also a reserve officer in the German army and says he has consulted on defence projects in the past.
The startup currently has about 20 employees but aims to grow to more than 30 over the summer. It will use the new funding to further develop its platform as well as for hiring, Wessendorff says.
‘Defence comes first’
Though Project Q has ambitions for commercial use cases, “defence comes first for us,” says Wessendorff.
The company works with partners to get hardware, and already has the German Bundeswehr (armed forces) as a customer for pilot projects, and is in talks for bigger contracts, says Wessendorff. Project Q is also hoping to land projects with other NATO and European forces, says Wessendorff; the startup works with defence primes, though he declined to name companies.
Wessendorff says the company is currently making money, but did not disclose how much. “We charge the partner capabilities and, of course, the hardware products, but in the end, it’s a license model,” he says. Currently “everything is quite project related — we get contracts and projects by the German customer and by the MoD [Ministry of Defence], and we are working our way towards the license model.”
Project Q also offers an open source component: partners can collaborate with the company to send data. If the customer has “engineering power on their end, [they are] able to further develop the application we built for them,” which “enables them, in the long run, to more or less own the systems,” says Wessendorff.
It’s part of the startup’s so-called “internet-of-defence kind of approach”, Wessendorff says, referring to the Internet of Things (IoT) concept of connecting objects to the internet.
Building battlefield software integrating various data points isn’t unique to Project Q; others like AI defence unicorn Helsing are also working on AI for battlefield intelligence. Wessendorff acknowledges that Helsing and the big defence primes could be somewhat in competition: “I mean, what’s the common factor? It’s AI. Of course, we work with AI as well.” But he argues Project Q’s approach of connecting commercial, off-the-shelf civilian technologies and making them available for defence helps it stand out.
While defence is the priority now, Project Q also aims to eventually use its platform for things like protecting critical infrastructure like airports and power plants.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/battlefield-software-project-q-fundraise/
