Quantum Systems

Quantum-Systems GmbH was founded in 2015 in Gilching, a town just west of Munich, by Florian Seibel and a small team that had been working on electric vertical-takeoff fixed-wing aircraft. Seibel, who also co-founded the urban-air-mobility venture Lilium and later the loitering-munition firm Stark, remains chief executive. The company began life selling small mapping drones to agriculture and survey customers; the pivot to defence came after February 2022, and within three years the firm had become one of the most visible European drone makers supplying Ukraine.

The product line is anchored by two airframes. The Vector is a 2.8-metre eVTOL fixed-wing drone that takes off and lands vertically on three rotors before transitioning to wing-borne flight, giving it roughly three hours of endurance for tactical reconnaissance. A Vector AI variant, developed with Polish partners, carries an acoustic sensor that can locate artillery by sound and pass coordinates back to ground units operating in jammed or GPS-denied environments. The Trinity family — including the F90+ and the larger Trinity Pro — uses the same VTOL-to-fixed-wing trick at a longer-endurance, mapping-oriented scale, with the F90+ flying for up to ninety minutes. The earlier Tron, released in March 2017, established the template. More recent additions push the company past pure ISR: Reliant is a 4.3-metre drone carrier aimed at the United States market, and Twister is a strike-drone framework programme that in December 2025 won a German Ministry of Defence order for 747 units.

Ukraine is the operational proving ground. Vector and Trinity airframes have been delivered into Ukrainian service in three-figure quantities since 2022, financed through a mix of direct German government procurement, the European Peace Facility, and private donations channelled through groups such as the Come Back Alive foundation. The Bundeswehr itself fields the Vector under the LUNA NG-adjacent reconnaissance requirement, and the company has supplied units to the United States Army, the Australian Defence Force, the UK, Ukraine’s allies in the Baltics, and several Asian customers. A US subsidiary, Quantum-Systems Inc., was set up in Moorpark, California to chase Department of Defense work.

Funding has tracked the wider European defence-tech surge. A Series B in 2023 was followed by a Series C announced in mid-2025 that valued the firm at more than one billion euros, making it one of the first defence-focused unicorns to emerge from continental Europe alongside Helsing. Backers include Project A, Notion Capital, Bullhound, HV Capital, Porsche SE and the German government’s DefenceTech-friendly funds. The company has scaled its Gilching headcount sharply and opened satellite engineering offices to keep up with serial production demands.

The political backdrop is unavoidable. German defence-export rules historically constrained how quickly Berlin could move drones into combat zones, and Quantum-Systems has been part of the public argument — alongside Helsing and Rheinmetall — that European militaries need to industrialise unmanned systems at Ukrainian tempo rather than peacetime tempo. Within that field the firm occupies a particular niche: small, attritable, sensor-rich airframes that survive electronic warfare, built in volumes that match how the war is actually being fought.