One of Europe’s biggest defense startups got its start in the American market with help from the CIA’s venture capital arm. Co-CEO Sven Kruck told Reuters that US investors including In-Q-Tel opened doors in Washington for Quantum Systems and helped the company win work with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Kruck said the reconnaissance contract with US intelligence agencies was small in revenue terms but established the company’s credibility. Quantum Systems sells reconnaissance, attack, and interceptor drones to customers including Ukraine and Germany, and Reuters puts its valuation at roughly $8 billion.

I have been covering this company since 2024, back when it was a Bavarian VTOL specialist most American readers had never heard of. The part of Kruck’s account that will travel furthest is not the intelligence contract. It is the admission that one of Europe’s biggest defense startups found its footing in Washington before it found it in Berlin.

In-Q-Tel Sells Access More Than It Sells Capital

In-Q-Tel is the venture firm US intelligence officials created to find technology relevant to national security. Its checks are usually small, often under $3 million. The real value, one person familiar with its operations told Reuters, is the introduction to American defense buyers, the sector’s biggest spenders.

The name nods to James Bond’s gadget maker Q, and the portfolio history includes Palantir and Anduril. In-Q-Tel also holds a stake in Stark, the German strike-drone company founded by Quantum Systems co-founder Florian Seibel after investors blocked the parent company from arming its surveillance platforms. Jennifer Nelson, the fund’s executive vice president international, described Germany to Reuters as an important innovation partner and strategic ally, and said In-Q-Tel keeps expanding its investments in German dual-use companies.

Kruck was blunt about how that works in practice. “It made it easier to get started in the U.S.,” he said, naming the CIA and FBI as the clients. He also volunteered that In-Q-Tel has not sent him an unprompted email in two years, a fair reminder that this is a network story rather than a control story.

Quantum Systems Already Builds Inside the United States

The company is not a foreign vendor shipping boxes across the Atlantic. Quantum Systems runs a 135,000-square-foot (12,500-square-meter) integration and production site in Moorpark, California, opened in June 2025, and its Vector eVTOL reconnaissance aircraft joined the Pentagon’s Blue UAS Cleared List that August.

Kruck tied the physical presence directly to Washington’s rules for foreign defense suppliers, telling Reuters that the local-operations requirement is why the company runs factories and staffs them in the United States. The arrangement carries a cost European governments are only starting to price in. Like any defense supplier, Quantum Systems cannot sell technology developed on American soil to other countries without American approval.

For US drone buyers, this is the supply chain the FCC Covered List action left standing when it swept foreign drones out of the import market. Blue UAS listing is the pathway onto federal buying schedules, and Moorpark is a large part of why Quantum Systems qualifies for it.

European Lawmakers Are Watching the Investor, Not the Check

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament’s security and defense committee, argues that a fund tied to US intelligence should not be judged like an ordinary shareholder. She told Reuters that In-Q-Tel carries a mandate to secure technology for American intelligence services.

Strack-Zimmermann pointed to observation rights and access to government contracts as channels of influence that run past equity. Germany’s defense ministry said it takes investor influence in the sector seriously and that shareholders should not interfere with a company’s operations or research. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said earlier this year that the agency was refining how it works with the private sector. The CIA declined to comment.

The gap Reuters leaves open is the one that decides the argument. Kruck groups In-Q-Tel among “US investors,” but the story does not say how large the fund’s position in Quantum Systems is or what rights came attached to it, and Nelson’s statement addressed Europe broadly rather than this company. Those are the numbers a strategic-influence claim turns on. Quantum Systems is preparing an initial public offering as early as 2027, and a prospectus is where holdings and export-control constraints stop being optional disclosures.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the American drone-independence story running backwards, and it deserves a straight look.

Washington spent four years telling US operators to stop buying Chinese and built the Blue UAS list to tell them what to buy instead. One of the strongest non-Chinese platforms on that list belongs to a German company that says it got through the door partly because a CIA-funded venture arm made introductions. That is not a scandal. It is how the trusted-supplier system was designed to work. But nobody should pretend a trusted supply chain is a neutral engineering standard. It is a supply chain Washington can constrain, and the export-approval requirement Kruck described is that constraint written down.

The counterpoint is real and I will grant it. In-Q-Tel’s checks are tiny next to the $246 million German Army contract Quantum Systems booked in December, and a fund that has not emailed the co-CEO in two years is not steering anything. Strack-Zimmermann’s concern is about structure, not about a hand on the tiller.

Structure is the point, though. Europe has no In-Q-Tel. It has ministers who want sovereign capability and a capital market that keeps outsourcing the introduction problem to American funds. Until that changes, every European drone company that wants the US market walks the same path Quantum Systems walked, and signs the same approval clause on the way in. My read is that the interceptor work Quantum Systems is pushing with Ukrainian partners is where this gets tested first, because that is the one program where Europe cannot afford to wait on anyone’s sign-off.

Sources: Reuters (John O’Donnell and Maria Rugamer), Seeking Alpha, Quantum Systems

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.