Kraken Technology Becomes Europe’s Newest Defence Unicorn

Kraken Technology Group, a British maker of unmanned surface vessels built for NATO and allied navies, closed a $175m Series B at a $1bn valuation on 9 July 2026, turning the six-year-old startup into Europe’s newest defence unicorn. The round was led by DTCP, a Hamburg-based investment firm, with the British Business Bank, Germany’s Rheinmetall, US autonomous-systems company Anduril, and the venture arms of multiple European governments joining in.

What sets this raise apart is the strategic roster behind the cheque. Kraken counts the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, USSOCOM and the Royal Navy among its customers, and its manufacturing partnerships already stretch from Germany to Canada.

A $175M Round Built Like a Coalition

The Series B drew capital from four distinct buckets at once: a lead private investor in DTCP, sovereign and quasi-sovereign capital in the British Business Bank and the NATO Innovation Fund’s defence investment portfolio, two listed strategic investors in Rheinmetall and Inocea Group, and a venture bench of HICO, Thesiger Capital Group, BOKA Capital, Supernova Invest and Hakluyt Capital. Earlier backers NIF, the UK’s NSSIF, SmartCap, Notion Capital and Speedinvest converted prior positions into equity as part of the round.

Several of those names are doing more than writing a cheque. Rheinmetall, Inocea (parent of Davie Shipbuilding), and Anduril have signed on as manufacturing partners for the K3 SCOUT, K4 MANTA, K5 KRAKEN and K7 SABRE vessel families. Kraken says the round will fund localised production in Germany, the United States and Canada, with two more regions to be announced. PJT Partners was exclusive financial advisor and Clifford Chance was legal counsel to the company on the Series B.

Six Years From a Speedboat to a NATO-Adjacent Round

Kraken was founded in 2020 in Fareham by Mal Crease. The company’s design language draws on the offshore racing heritage that DTCP credits with Kraken’s speed and sea-keeping: sharp planing hulls, modular bays, low freeboard, built for high sea states in volumes closer to performance-boat shops than to traditional naval yards.

Crease framed the round as a delivery commitment. “This significant funding round will accelerate Kraken’s global roll-out, enabling the deployment of hardened, reliable, mission-ready capabilities for NATO and its worldwide partners at an unprecedented scale in the maritime domain,” he said.

DTCP, which runs a defence-focused fund out of Hamburg, said Kraken’s pitch cleared its investment bar on three counts: an under-served market, a manufacturable product, and a NATO procurement window that has opened in the last two years. The firm invested through its DTCP Defence vehicle, which targets mission-critical technologies that strengthen European strategic resilience.

Kraken says its platforms are deployed in support of multiple ongoing conflicts, and each of the company’s facilities is rated to produce up to 1,000 units a year. Notion Capital, an earlier backer, said it had supported Kraken since the prior summer, when the team’s conviction was that the maritime domain needed exactly the kind of fast, mission-ready uncrewed vessels the company set out to build.

How Rheinmetall and Anduril Joined as Co-Investors

Rheinmetall brings German industrial capacity to the production of the K-series hulls. Anduril, under a partnership announced in April 2026, will build the K5 KRAKEN and K7 SABRE vessels for the US Navy at American facilities, integrate payloads and Lattice autonomy software on US soil, and sustain the fleet domestically. Inocea’s Davie Shipbuilding, in Canada, has signed on as the third leg of that production triangle.

The maritime domain is profoundly under-invested, and Kraken has taken a leading role in bringing affordable, mission-critical high-speed unmanned vessels to the market in a very short time. The Kraken team answered the call and responded to NATO countries’ need for immediate maritime capabilities to secure our waters, our shores and our offshore installations.

That is Ole Aguirre, partner at DTCP, in the lead investor’s $175m Series B release. Each of Kraken’s facilities is rated to produce up to 1,000 vessels a year, and the company is targeting NATO navies that buy at that volume.

Three Recent Operational Wins

Kraken’s case to new investors now leans on three recent operational moments.

• USSOCOM, May 2026: US Special Operations Command awarded Kraken a $49m-cap Other Transaction Authority to develop next-generation uncrewed surface and subsurface vessels under a transatlantic development contract.
• Anduril partnership, April 2026: Anduril’s joint statement with Kraken committed to US manufacture of the K5 and K7 hulls, with payloads above 1,000 pounds and a domestic sustainment line.
• Royal Navy Project BEEHIVE, 8 July 2026: A K3 SCOUT was dropped four times from an A400M transport at 1,300 feet into waters up to Sea State 4, the world’s first airdrop of an uncrewed surface vessel from an aircraft, and validated the use of military transport aircraft as a rapid-insertion path for unmanned maritime craft.

Kraken’s existing production runs sit alongside those wins. The K3 SCOUT is in service with the Royal Navy for surveillance, logistics and precision-strike roles; the K4 MANTA is built for high-speed surface and covert subsurface transit; the K5 KRAKEN is sized for coastal combat. The Series B’s purpose, by Crease’s account, is to expand localised manufacturing fast enough to feed NATO demand without a year-long order backlog.

The company’s footprint already extends past the partnership triangle. Kraken says further manufacturing partnerships are coming in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific, in line with NATO’s widening geographic brief, and the Series B is structured to fund that expansion alongside the named regional contracts.

The US Navy Forecast Behind This Round

At a Surface Naval Association symposium in January 2026, Rear Adm. Christopher Alexander, the navy’s senior uniformed requirements officer, put a number on the shift Kraken’s investors are now funding. “Looking at some projections moving out over the future, by 2045 we expect about 45 percent of the surface force to be unmanned systems,” he said, framing unmanned vessels as a near-half of the surface fleet within twenty years.

Procurement language is moving in the same direction. In March 2026, the US Navy cancelled its Modular Attack Surface Craft programme and opened a new medium-USV marketplace. Anduril’s decision to build Kraken’s K5 and K7 hulls in the US, with 1,000-plus-pound payloads, is the kind of placement that gets Kraken inside that marketplace without re-speccing the product. NATO’s parallel request, for affordable mass-producible maritime capability, maps the same way across European allies.

For Crease and his earliest backers, the round settles the question of demand. What comes next is volume production from Fareham.