Those bullish on Europe’s defence tech industry talk of a future where the current ‘primes’ — the decades-old defence corporations, like BAE Systems, Thales, Leonardo and Rheinmetall, which hold major contracts with many European governments — are replaced by a new, tech-led generation.
Germany-headquartered surveillance drone maker Quantum Systems is considered one of the top candidates to become a prime of the future. It’s signed contracts with governments around the world, including Australia, Germany and the US, and completed thousands of operations in Ukraine.
The company raised a €160m Series C in May 2025, hitting unicorn status — and is seeing its revenue double year on year.
The challenge now, as CEO and cofounder Florian Seibel told the Sifted Podcast recently, is “not to become like one of the primes”.
Read on for lightly-edited highlights from our conversation with Seibel.
Most of your revenue these days comes from military drones. Who are you selling those to?
To become an international drone manufacturer and player, going where your customers are was essential for our success. We have roughly 700 employees — at our office in Los Angeles, in Australia, at our headquarters in Germany — and we have about 200 people in Kyiv to support our Ukraine operations. So the plan is to increase our presence in more countries across Europe and across the world to become the dominant drone player — and I think that’s something the western world needs.
When I look to China and how they’re pushing robotics… They just had the Olympics in robotics and there was some media attention on this in Europe, in which basically everybody was laughing at China, saying how awkward and how not like humans these robots still behave, and how stupid China is to have this competition. But we have laughed at China many times — at their automotive industry and their solar industry — and then a few years later, they came back and outperformed us. So I think we really have to wake up and invest heavily in topics like robotics and automation.
It’s clear for me that the future is unmanned. We have all these AI agents now and eventually they will all run on great hardware that does something. And so if we do not speed up here and back this with really big money, we’re probably going to miss out on the next tech evolution.
The beautiful thing about being in defence is that we can help Ukraine and we can learn a lot from it. And we can also make some money off of it, which raises interest from investors, which allows us to invest more into R&D, which allows us to prepare for the markets to come once we have solved these topics that Europe is currently facing.
What will be some of the use cases for drones in the future, beyond military applications?
Once the world is set up for peace again, I think we will see use cases like drone first responders (DFRs) in the US. How can drones help to be the first at an accident site? On average, I think a police car takes around 11 or 12 minutes, depending on where you are in the US, to arrive on site. So a drone could speed there within a few minutes and get a live video stream to the police car of what is going on at the scene.
There are other use cases like monitoring pipelines. I think we will see a revival of agriculture use cases because those are challenging topics, and things we have to face in order to solve climate change. We have a growing world population. We have limited resources. So we need to optimise that.
We might see drones delivering stuff, but I’m not the biggest fan of these drone cargo delivery use cases. We see more drones in a context of public safety and security topics.
And then there’s also industry, production, robots that help you to get your chores and household jobs done.
Which other areas is Quantum looking to expand into imminently?
Quantum started in the domain of air, but we are in the process of acquiring and going into other domains, like land vehicles and maritime drones. They’re all connected very closely, because what you need to solve in the air is a three-dimensional problem of going from one point to the other without hitting something and navigating there. And the same is true when you go underwater; it’s just a different element.
And all these systems that we operate connect into one software suite that we are launching, which connects all these unmanned assets and elements.
We have seen a big fragmentation of the defence market; there’s a lot of different software and a lot of different hardware players. You also have the Army, the Air Force, the Navy… But in the end, what we should try to have is one overarching architecture that allows us to manage all of these assets, so there’s no difference if it’s for the Air Force or Marine or Army. They’re all the defence forces of a country, right? And I think we are missing out on optimising that by breaking that up into different domains. Now we’re talking about unmanned assets, why not bring all of this together and optimise it? There is no operation that is just using the Air Force or the Army; it’s always a combination of these forces.
So if the German government bought your software as their operating system for their Navy, their armed forces, their air force, they could use Quantum Systems drones, but they could also use ones from your competitors and they’d all plug into the same operating system?
Yes. And they’d pay a fixed fee per year so that it’s open.
Governments are really bad at building software themselves; we’ve seen it. And I think having competition — others that challenge you, that come up with new ideas, keep you moving — is good. A perfect example of this is Ukraine. We went there three years ago. We were quite successful in the first year, but in year two, nothing worked; GPS was blocked, communication was impossible. Russia brought all their jammers and the electronic warfare game was stepped up. Had we decided not to compete there and not gone into Ukraine, built a team on ground, had local software development… we probably would have failed. Competing — and competing on the battlefield — accelerates you more. It’s good for the customer. It’s good for the product. And in the end, it’s good for your own company because you will evolve. You will stay agile. You have to. Otherwise, you just become big and lazy. And at one point, you get disrupted. So I enjoy having competition.
I’ve heard criticism of drone makers that don’t have a team or a presence in Ukraine, people saying that those companies’ drones are no good. Do you think that’s true?
If you’re not in Ukraine, you do not exist as a manufacturer. There’s several reasons why. The first: getting stuff into Ukraine is fairly easy — they’re obviously very grateful for everything that we send them. But getting stuff out of Ukraine is much harder — for updates, for maintenance. So having a team on site helps to expedite the process of repair and maintenance.
If you’re not in Ukraine, you do not exist as a manufacturer
The second is the mindset of the locals. They’re in year three of the war, and they still work 24-7; there’s no weekend in Ukraine. Obviously, you cannot run a German company that way… But what we see is that these local employees in Kyiv start building relations with people inside Quantum headquarters here in Germany, and people suddenly start realising, ‘I don’t do this so it’s in the media or Florian can talk about it. I do this for the person that sits on the other end of my email. There’s a person behind it that I help.’ There’s a lot of travel between the two companies; we have a lot of Ukrainians coming here, and we have a lot of people from Quantum that got curious and went to Ukraine and suddenly… it becomes very personal for them to help and gives them meaning.
So I think that was the biggest game changer for Quantum, understanding what Ukraine is facing and how they tackle it unlocked potential here in Germany that I would have not expected. I think one of the problems we have in Europe is complacency. It’s all good, we go on vacation three times a year, we have flat screen TVs, we can order stuff online, it’s here the next day… but I think it’s really rewarding to have a bigger goal that you work towards beyond just optimising your time off.
What is the lifespan of a drone and how much does one cost?
We make ISR drones — intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones — which are much bigger than the first-person view (FPV) drones that you control with goggles. Our drones fly for much, much longer — three, four hours, over long distances, 30, 40, 50km. We provide target information for artillery or FPV operators. And those systems are more costly. We’re talking €100k versus a few thousand euros for the FPVs.
We have systems that have clocked more than a thousand missions in Ukraine. That justifies the price of the system, because when you break it down to the price per mission, it also comes down to more in the area of a thousand dollars. They carry higher resolution sensors, more expensive data links, and obviously they’re much, much bigger and more complex to build and produce and operate.
We try to update the software quite frequently, and we don’t see a lot of losses that are related to hardware failure. We do see an increasing number of losses from counter drone systems. It’s really a dogfight; we have incoming first-person view drones that basically hunt our drones, and even though we fly very high, sometimes we do get detected.
But this has started another optimisation game: how do we detect incoming counter drones and how do we evade them and have manoeuvres that outperform them. It’s constantly evolving, and if you are not ready to face it and if you do not go all in on it, you will not exist in a few months.
It’s not the job of Ukraine to sort through the zoo of drones they get provided and identify the systems that are working
That’s the big plus that Quantum got out of being the first Western drone company in Ukraine. Others just pitched to their investors that they’re shipping stuff to Ukraine — but that’s often where it ends, normally sitting in a big warehouse not getting used. It’s not the job of Ukraine to sort through the zoo of drones they get provided and identify the systems that are working. That’s not fair. It’s a war and it’s not a sandbox or a playground for Western drone companies to see what works and what doesn’t. Maybe that was the case in the beginning, but those times are over. It’s really about life or death for Ukraine and sending them equipment that does not work or just helps to satisfy your investors on the back of Ukraine is disgusting.
We all want the war to end, but what does that then mean for Quantum Systems? Having a very real competitor — Russia — to keep matching with is the most amazing kind of stimulus for innovation. How will you go about replicating that or keeping that up when hopefully some of these conflicts end?
Very good question. It’s about security guarantees, monitoring, borders… It’s about making sure that this does not happen again, which requires intelligence and surveillance.
We’re heavily in discussion with Taiwan. We’re helping them prepare what hopefully will not happen — a full scale invasion of China into Taiwan. That would also involve a lot of drones on both sides, I guess. So unfortunately, I think once Ukraine is solved, that does not mean peace will break out all over the world.
I think Europe needs to rearm, Europe needs to become much more sovereign. And that will not be done once Ukraine is done. I think that’s a task for the next decade — and unmanned systems will play a pivotal role in that.
You’ve won programmes of records with the governments of America, Colombia, Ukraine, Australia, Germany and Spain. What does it take to get one of those signed off and what improvement or progress in that process have you seen over the past few years?
Governments try to mitigate risk. What they do not want is to give a contract to a smaller player and then, even though it’s maybe the cheapest or the best overall offer in the end, maybe the startup does not make it, and then they have to explain to the politicians or to people why the drone programme failed. Rather than having that happen, they’re willing to spend double or triple the money and give it to a prime just because they can say, okay, they will exist. They’re too big to fail. It’s expensive, yes, but everybody accepts that. The public accepts that prices double or triple, but what they do not accept is if there’s a failure.
We solve this somehow because we are big enough, we have a track record, we have enough money in our pockets so that they consider us reliable and a good partner, but younger companies obviously struggle at that point still.
At one point you win the first programme of record and then it’s easier to win the next and the next and the next
I do understand that this is difficult, but we made it and so others can make it as well. I think it’s a mindset. It’s very hard in the beginning and you just have to keep going and going and going and at one point you will win the first programme and then it’s easier to win the next and the next and the next and then the big challenge at one point probably is to not become like one of the primes.
What’s the most frustrating thing about working with governments?
You see how fast things are changing. You see other countries like China; they have a 10, 20, 30 year strategy and they execute on it. And here in Germany, in Europe, the government changes every four or five years.
Having a democracy is great and I would not want to miss it. But I think when it comes to procurement and overall and long-term strategy, I think we need to come up with better solutions. This is very provocative what I’m going to say now, but you know, having a dictator saying, “OK, this is how we’re going to do it,” has advantages in a way. You can really make things happen, and just push through.
I think having the best of both of these worlds would be a good thing. Having a democracy for sure, but having a democracy that has a long-term strategy and that does not only play into four-year terms.
I have no answer as to how this could be established. I think the first thing would be to change the rules in Brussels on having 27 member states, where everybody can block everybody. That slows us down. We need to change the rules we play by and we need to act as one continent, as one Europe that can act fast and get seen as a strong big player.
How soon might you raise again?
Going into different domains it’s important to have financial firepower, backed with revenue. We try to not outgrow our performance on deliveries and programmes of records. Just raising the valuation, I think, will backfire at one point heavily — especially when the only option you have is an IPO, because then you have to be very, very transparent on what is real revenue and what is R&D money and so on.
Quantum does real revenue; we doubled last year, we doubled this year, we will double next year. So doubling valuation is a fair thing because we double revenue.
Probably by the end of this year, or early next year, we’ll be ready [to raise again].
There’s a lot of talk of Quantum Systems or Helsing becoming a kind of prime of the future, and maybe also a business that would become a major acquirer of lots of these other defence tech companies that are springing up. Is that the path you want?
I think growing and picking up other players that have technology that would make us better together is a logical thing. I think we need to do that at a speed and with a strategy that allows us to keep the Quantum DNA. So I’m not going to spend hundreds of millions for acquisitions because then I’d rather do it myself, but I do spend money for teams that I consider very valuable and a fit for Quantum that are not too big because integrating big teams into big teams is hard. Having smaller teams integrated into Quantum has turned out to be much more effective.
And obviously at one point we will be big. The question is how can we navigate that and stay agile and keep our DNA like I said before. But that’s the management challenge and that’s what I’m learning. I’m an engineer by heart. I was not trained to be a manager or a CEO. There is no such training besides just do it and listen to your heart and have a great team and build a great team. And that’s what we are doing. And then let’s see where it ends up. But for sure we are not done yet.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/quantum-systems-ceo-prime/
