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German drone maker Stark is facing a growing backlash in Berlin over its ties to US tech billionaire Peter Thiel, days before MPs must approve a critical deal worth up to €2.9bn for the company.
The Berlin-based defence start-up is one of two young companies that have been chosen to supply the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, with lethal attack drones. But it has faced mounting questions over the role of Thiel, one of its investors, who has close links to Donald Trump and is a vocal sceptic of liberal democracies.
On Tuesday, German defence minister Boris Pistorius — a member of the Social Democrats — voiced unease over Thiel’s involvement in Stark, little more than a week before a decision by the Bundestag’s budget committee on whether to approve the drone supply deal.
Pistorius said he “expressly” shared the concerns of those who were worried about Thiel’s role.
“We simply need to clarify what influence Mr Thiel actually has,” he said on a visit to a special forces command in south-west Germany. “If he has influence over operations, holds a blocking minority in whatever form, then we are talking about a different situation than if he is, for example, a single-digit percentage shareholder but has no influence over operations.”
MPs from the opposition Green party have led the campaign against the start-up.
They have warned the government against striking a deal with a company backed by a figure with ties to the Trump administration, at a time when Europe is seeking to reduce its dependency on the US and called for Stark to find another investor to buy out Thiel’s stake.
Thiel was among the first high-profile figures in tech to back Trump, donating $1.25mn to his 2016 campaign and serving on the president’s transition team. The PayPal co-founder has also been key to JD Vance’s ascent, backing Vance’s venture capital fund in 2020 before bankrolling his Senate run in 2022.
Stark has declined to disclose the exact size of his stake, saying only that it is less than 10 per cent and does not entail any special voting rights of the kind that would trigger a review under German foreign investment rules.
The company said in a statement that Thiel also had “no information rights relating to our products or business operations”. It added: “Any transfer of technical details concerning our products is subject to German export control regulations and would require prior approval by the Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control.”
Thiel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Stark’s other backers include the CIA-linked VC fund In-Q-Tel and Döpfner Capital — a fund set up by Moritz Döpfner, the son of Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of media giant Axel Springer. Moritz Döpfner used to work for Thiel and reportedly received $50mn in funding from the billionaire for his new venture.
Sebastian Schäfer, the Green party’s defence specialist on the budget committee, told the FT that Germany would be reliant on drone makers for the security of the armed forces — and the country. “I don’t want to rely on shareholders that want to end our European democracies,” he said.
Schäfer said that Stark, which was valued at €1bn in a recent funding round, should find another investor to buy out Thiel.
Others have also raised questions about some financial aspects of the contract awarded to Stark, which is larger than the deal awarded simultaneously to Helsing.
Stark’s deal is worth €269mn initially, with the potential to rise to €2.86bn. For Munich-based Helsing, which is backed by Spotify’s Swedish founder Daniel Ek, the deal is worth up to €1.46bn.
The contracts, seen by the FT, also set out differing timeframes for the delivery of the weapons, with a schedule of up to 26 months for Stark’s Virtus drones compared with 13 months for Helsing’s HX-2.
The number of systems to be delivered by each supplier was redacted from the documents.
Andreas Schwarz, the Social Democrats’ MP on the budget committee, called for more transparency on the deals. “This important procurement project, with its large and differing contract sizes for the two suppliers, still raises questions and requires clarification,” he told Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper this week.
Pistorius said that all the questions and concerns about pricing would be answered in a session with the defence committee next week.
