LONDON — Tekever has closed the first tranche of a Series D round worth $580 million at a $6.4 billion valuation, the uncrewed-systems maker announced on 23 September. The round is co-led by UC Investments, the investment arm of the University of California, and Baillie Gifford, with Merlyn Advisors joining as a new strategic investor alongside existing backers Crescent Cove, Ventura Capital and Iberis Capital.
By the numbers
The valuation is a steep mark-up on where the company was trading in August, when Bloomberg reported it was seeking roughly €500 million at a €5.5 billion valuation. Tekever was founded in Portugal in 2001 and has since moved its headquarters to the UK. Its systems have logged more than 50,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine since 2022 — the operational record investors are explicitly pricing.
The order book behind the raise is concrete. In July the British Army selected Tekever’s AR5 for Project CORVUS, its Watchkeeper replacement, in a contract worth up to £400 million over 10 years, with airframes built in Swindon. The AR5 is a fixed-wing aircraft with 20 hours of endurance, a 100 km/h cruise, a 7.3-metre by 4.0-metre airframe and a 50 kg payload, launched and recovered from unprepared airstrips. Tekever markets it as Europe’s first UAS-based maritime surveillance system; the Portuguese Air Force flies it for exclusive economic zone patrol.
Tekever says the capital goes to international expansion, manufacturing and technology capacity, and acquisitions. That last item is not idle: on 22 September the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Estonia’s Threod Systems, a day before the raise went public. Neither revenue nor headcount was disclosed.
“Europe’s security will increasingly depend on its ability to build technology companies that can innovate at speed.”
Sir Ben Wallace, portfolio manager at Merlyn Advisors and former UK Defence Secretary
Baillie Gifford investment manager Chris Evdaimon credited Tekever’s “software-centric model and operational experience” with letting it turn technology into deployable capability quickly — the same argument every physical-AI company now makes, with the difference that this one has the flight hours to cite.
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