Ground A raises €9.1M pre-seed to put laser drone defence on a pallet

Munich’s Ground A has raised a €9.1M pre-seed round led by Vsquared Ventures, with drone manufacturer Quantum Systems and five more funds joining, to bring its GA 1000 laser counter-drone system into series production in Germany.

Europe keeps learning, one closed runway at a time, that violating our airspace costs almost nothing and answering it costs a fortune. The good news is that the capital chasing that asymmetry is finally arriving at the right layer of the stack. Below, I lay out the round, the machine, and why a company founded in January is already talking about series production.

Vsquared leads, Quantum Systems joins the cap table

Ground A announced the €9.1M pre-seed on 8 September (Tech.eu and Tech Funding News, both 8 September). Vsquared Ventures, the Munich deeptech fund, led the round. Quantum Systems, the Bavarian drone maker, invested directly – joined by GRIF, Robin Capital, ABACON, Leblon Capital and OVNI Capital, with the company’s own investor page also naming Elephant Lake Capital and J14 Capital.

The angel list reads like a map of Munich defence tech: Quantum Systems co-founder Florian Seibel, J14 Capital’s Sven Kruck and Andreas Nauerz, and ARX Robotics’ Marlon Braumann and Stefan Roebel.

The money goes to bringing the first GA 1000 units to market, growing the team and setting up series production in Germany, with a further round planned for 2027 to scale manufacturing (Tech.eu, 8 September).

From five people to a field-ready laser in seven months

Ground A was founded in January 2026 by Tobias Brune, an engineer with a doctorate from RWTH Aachen, together with Daniel Hariri and Roland Ralph Spiegelhalder. The team has grown from five people in March to around 25 today (Tech Funding News, 8 September).

The GA 1000 is a high-energy laser system that detects, classifies, tracks and neutralises small drones. It weighs under 200 kg, fits on a standard Euro pallet, and four people can move it – air defence you can load into a van rather than park on a base. Radar, optical sensors, computer vision and the company’s own AI handle the targeting, and the system is designed to plug into NATO command-and-control networks and to mount on platforms such as tanks and unmanned ground vehicles (Tech Funding News, 8 September).

The company went from prototype to testing and validation in roughly seven months and has no sales yet. Its CEO is candid about why investors came in anyway: “I am very happy that there are several companies involved since at the moment there is no viable, scalable solution,” Brune told Tech Funding News.

A $9.17bn market compounding at 26.5% a year

The global counter-drone market is worth $9.17bn in 2026 and is forecast to reach $29.70bn by 2031, a 26.5% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, August 2026). Behind that growth rate sits a brutal cost equation: the drones being intercepted are cheap and getting cheaper, while the interceptors most armies fire at them are not. A laser’s ammunition is electricity, which is the whole argument – Ground A pitches the GA 1000 as neutralising threats “at a fraction of conventional cost”, a company claim its future order book will have to prove.

We have logged this pattern before: INLEAP Photonics raised a €20M seed for laser drone defence less than a week ago, and EGIDE raised €8M in April for affordable drone interceptors. Two European laser counter-drone rounds inside one week is not a coincidence; it is a procurement signal.

Munich arms both sides of the drone duel

So what does it say when Europe’s best-known drone manufacturer invests in the thing built to shoot drones down? Quantum Systems is on Ground A’s cap table both corporately and through its co-founder personally, and ARX Robotics operators sit beside them. Munich’s defence cluster is recycling its capital and its people into the next layer of the stack, exactly the way we watched American clusters do it in software.

A €9.1M pre-seed for a 25-person company with no revenue also tells you how fast the stage labels are drifting in European defence tech: this is seed money moving at pre-seed speed. What to watch now is whether the GA 1000 converts validation into first orders, and whether the 2027 manufacturing round arrives at the size the production plan implies.

Europe will not answer the cheap drone with one silver bullet; it will answer it with a stack – sensors, interceptors, jammers and now lasers on pallets, tracked round by round in our fundraising data. The drones got cheap first. The defences are catching up fast. Let’s keep the momentum!