Europe is being forced to confront a reality it has long delayed: its defence industry is no longer fit for purpose. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte summed it up bluntly—”our industry is still too small, it is too fragmented and—to be honest—it is too slow.” A new player wants to change that.
Today, STARK, a new European defence company, emerged from stealth with the launch of its first product: the OWE-V, an AI-guided strike drone designed from the ground up for the drone war era. The company spent nearly a year in R&D, working directly with Ukrainian and NATO forces to build a system that can respond to real-time battlefield conditions. The result is a drone that can launch vertically, strike targets up to 100 kilometers away, and operate under heavy electronic warfare pressure.
“At STARK we understand that effective deterrence demands resilient and innovative defence capabilities. We cannot win tomorrow’s conflicts with the systems designed for yesterday’s wars,” said Managing Director of STARK International Philip Lockwood.
“We also cannot be complacent about the status quo: our solutions need to evolve at the rapid pace of innovation seen in both hardware and software. The OWE-V reflects our commitment to constant innovation to meet our operators’ needs.”
“It’s an amazing group of people who believe in an audacious idea: let’s create a new European defence prime when we need technological innovation the most,” said Lockwood who was also former head of the NATO Innovation Unit. “I met literally hundreds if not thousands of startup entrepreneurs; this is the best opportunity I’ve seen at the intersection of problem, team, and most importantly timing. Europe has been awakened and STARK is the most exciting company out there to show the world how we can build technology for our defensive edge.”
The OWE-V was tested in live-fire conditions in Ukraine. It is VTOL-capable and software-enabled, meaning it can be deployed without runways and can be recalled mid-flight. It also supports iterative refinement—what STARK calls a core development principle—based on real-world feedback from the field. The system is modular, designed for fast updates, and built for mass production across European manufacturing hubs.
STARK is part of the UXS Alliance, joining other unmanned systems companies like Quantum Systems and ARX Robotics to provide a common voice and rapid innovation pipeline for Europe’s drone sector. Based in Berlin and Munich, with a growing production footprint across the continent, the company is focused on building the industrial base NATO needs—not in 2030, but now.
