Some more consolidation is afoot in the defence startup world, this time taking aim at one of the more pernicious threats in the world of defence tech: the rise and use of electronic warfare. Today Stark, the Berlin-based company that is building air drones and other autonomous systems for other domains, announced that it is acquiring Raydiant RF, a Berlin-based startup that specialises in technology for systems to bypass electronic warfare in contested environments.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Apart from receiving some outside prize money for its technology, Raydiant, founded in 2024, appeared to be fully bootstrapped and owned by the founder and CEO, Dr Luca Steinweg. Steinweg will be joining Stark as its head of communications/electronic warfare. The company’s four-person engineering team also be coming with the acquisition.
Stark said that the plan will be to integrate Raydiant RF’s technology into its unmanned systems and Minerva mission management software.
Stark, notably, had already been working on its own EW solution called R-Zero. This aims to let unmanned systems run reconnaissance missions and detect the hostile transmitters and radar installations that are being used to jam signals.
Stark said Raydiant RF will give it a wider range of tools to complement that in areas like antenna design, analogue electronics and software-defined radios. In other words, this is not just tech to detect where EW is being waged from, but signalling hardware and software to navigate through areas where it is still being used.
“Communications, reconnaissance and the ability to operate in an increasingly contested frequency spectrum determine whether unmanned systems remain operational, reach their targets and successfully complete their missions,” said Johannes Schaback, CTO of Stark, in a statement. “Raydiant RF brings exactly the technological depth we need to develop these capabilities in-house and integrate them closely with our unmanned systems and AI.”
The deal touches on two trends:
The first is that more M&A will likely play out in the coming months and years in defence tech. Larger companies will be looking for better economies of scale in production, and buyers will be looking for easier procurement flows that do not demand a lot of integration at their end of disparate platforms.
Incumbents in the space — large prime contractors — set the pace for how systems are acquired, and that will also pressurise startups to collaborate more closely with them and with each other. Inevitably some of that will lead to acquisitions when one startup is much larger and taking on the role of consolidator.
That is the case with Stark. The company started as a spinout of Quantum Systems — to build “systems for the reality of modern warfare,” in the words of Schaback — and it is now valued at over €3 billion after a €500 million fundraise in June 2026.
The second trend is the need for better systems to work in electronic warfare environments. EW, where adversaries use jamming and other techniques to interfere with radio frequencies to disrupt how drones and other autonomous systems operate, has become so prevalent in war zones, such as in Ukraine, that many battalions have resorted to using fibre-optic cables to operate and control their machinery and receive communications from it.
Fibre optics, however, create other limitations and their own significant problems — not least a giant environmental disaster in the making — so everyone is on the look-out for systems to bypass EW in less-impacting ways.
Stark works in and with a number of countries, including the UK, but its most lucrative deal at the moment is with its home country. Germany’s Bundeswehr has signed a framework deal with the company that could be worth as much as €2.86 billion if fully exercised. No guarantee on this as it covers several years and essentially requires Stark to still bid for individual orders.
Stark has acquired at least two other companies in the last year. In July 2025 it acquired Pleno to build out more swarming capabilities. In December 2025, it acquired AeroMass to scale out its manufacturing capabilities.
