One of the primary ways that younger defence startups scale to win major deals is by teaming up with bigger legacy players that want to incorporate more cutting-edge technology into its own stack.
The latest partnership on that front was announced earlier today. Kraken Technology, a UK startup building autonomous and uncrewed maritime defence systems, and Germany’s NVL are forming a joint venture to develop a new wave of autonomous marine defence systems.
NVL is one of the oldest names in naval shipbuilding, formed out of Lürssen, founded in the 19th century. Its footprint includes a number of major shipyards in Germany, and it has contracts for providing major naval vessels for a range of countries.
The deal not only underscores a route for how smaller defence startups are able to scale up to target the defence and industrial markets; it also speaks to how primes are tapping innovative, faster-moving smaller startups to ramp up their innovation profile faster.
(Case in point: NVL has an R&D arm that was already developing autonomous solutions, specifically around the concept of “manned-unmanned teaming”, it said, yet Kraken, at a fraction of the size of NVL, is doing and developing more.)
The two companies were actually already known to each other. NVL disclosed today that it is also a strategic investor in the company by way of participation in a funding round that Kraken announced in June 2025. (At the time the round was made public only investors disclosed were the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK government-backed NSSIF, and Estonian VC firm Superangel. It’s not clear if there are other investors in that round that are still undisclosed, and Kraken has never disclosed how much it has raised.)
NVL has options to participate in Kraken’s next round — valuation again undisclosed — which the startup is in the process of raising right now.
On NVL’s side, the deal gives the company a big bargaining chip when it’s going into bids for new business: it’s now able to say it’s doubling down on the AI-fuelled new wave of technology that’s driving digital transformation across the enterprise. In the military and industrial sectors, this includes a large opportunity to build unmanned, autonomous systems.
The JV will see NVL building craft (specifically platforms that can be modified and loaded to customer needs) out of one of its shipyards — Blohm+Voss in Hamburg — to fill out what it described as “globally growing demand” for uncrewed maritime systems both for military and non-military uses such as securing critical infrastructure.
On Kraken’s side, the JV gives the smaller startup a much bigger platform for manufacturing. From what we understand, Kraken prior to this deal was manufacturing its hardware directly — it has announced three different products to date. It already had deals in place with a few of departments of defence including the UK and select allies. However, the JV with NVL is a major step up in terms of what it can produce and thus which contracts it can bid for.
Kraken declined to comment on whether it has other manufacturing partners, and it declined to comment on whether its relationship with NVL is exclusive.
The companies said the partnership plans to offer end-to-end services, including crewed naval vessels combined with autonomous and individually configurable deployment systems. Manufacturing will start in Q4 2025 and will focus first on smaller vessels before ultimately tackling larger uncrewed vessels.
“The joint venture with Kraken offers us the opportunity to rapidly react to the latest requirements of our customers and to provide market-ready autonomous systems quickly and in high volumes,” said Tim Wagner, CEO of NVL, in a statement. “At the same time, by taking this step, we are expanding our role as a pioneer in the development of manned/unmanned teaming (MUM-T) concepts and are creating the right conditions for launching additional innovative solutions in this field. This also includes, for instance, our design concepts for the naval tender vessel NTV 130 as a drone mothership that could succeed the six tender vessels (the ELBE class) currently operated by the German Navy.”
“We are honoured to partner with NVL as we expand our ability to provide fully sovereign, autonomous maritime capabilities to our Allied nations. Working with NVL will allow exponential scaling of production and supply chain to meet growing threats through deployment of high-performance, multi-role, mass capabilities across our seas,” added Mal Crease, CEO of Kraken Technology Group. “NVL are unquestionably the gold standard of maritime production and being able to draw and develop from such expertise and repurpose it for use in smaller, uncrewed platforms will bring a vital and much-needed step-change to the European maritime defence industry.”
