TEKEVER Raises $580 Million Series D at a $6.4 Billion Valuation

TEKEVER, a defense technology company building AI-enabled autonomous surveillance drones, has raised $580 million in the first tranche of a Series D round led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford, at a $6.4 billion valuation. The company, founded in Portugal and now headquartered in the United Kingdom, builds drone systems for battlefield intelligence, maritime patrol, and border surveillance.

TEKEVER's drones have logged more than 50,000 flight hours in Ukraine, giving the company an unusually large body of combat-tested operational data compared to most defense technology startups, whose systems typically reach that scale of real-world deployment only after years of government procurement cycles. That operational track record, rather than a purely technical specification sheet, is likely central to the confidence reflected in this round's size and valuation, since defense buyers in particular tend to weight proven battlefield performance far more heavily than laboratory results when evaluating a new surveillance or intelligence system.

The involvement of UC Investments, the University of California's investment arm, and Baillie Gifford, a large Scottish asset manager better known for public equity growth investing than early-stage defense technology, signals a broadening of the investor base willing to back defense-focused startups at scale, a shift that has accelerated across European and Ukraine-adjacent defense technology over the past two to three years as the war has demonstrated the strategic and commercial value of autonomous surveillance systems in live conflict conditions.

A $6.4 billion valuation places TEKEVER among the larger privately held European defense technology companies, and the scale of this round, $580 million in a first tranche alone, suggests the company is positioning for continued rapid expansion of both its manufacturing capacity and its government customer base across NATO-aligned markets, rather than treating its current scale as a plateau.

For founders building in defense technology or dual-use autonomous systems, TEKEVER's trajectory, from a Portuguese-founded company to a UK-headquartered, multi-billion-dollar-valued platform with extensive live operational deployment, illustrates how quickly capital and valuation can scale once a defense technology company demonstrates sustained real-world performance rather than pilot-stage results alone.

The round also lands amid a broader reallocation of European institutional capital toward defense and security technology, as governments across the continent increase defense spending commitments and investors increasingly treat the sector as a durable, multi-decade category rather than a temporary response to a single ongoing conflict. A round of this size closing in a first tranche alone, with more capital evidently still available in the round, suggests TEKEVER's backers expect demand for autonomous surveillance capability to keep growing well beyond the current conflict that generated much of the company's operational data to date.

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