> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://kintaronote.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How Three German Soldiers Built ARX Robotics for the Battlefield: Marc Wietfeld, Stefan Roebel, and Maximilian Wied - URL: https://kintaronote.com/how-three-german-soldiers-built-arx-robotics-for-the-battlefield-marc-wietfeld-stefan-roebel-and-maximilian-wied/ - Published: 2026-09-12T23:06:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-12T23:06:41.000Z - Author: kintaro - Tags: Philosophy The rise of companies like [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) did not happen in isolation. Defense technology has been undergoing a broader shift toward venture-backed startups, dual-use technologies, and faster development cycles—a transition I explored in my earlier piece, [ **Code to Combat: How Venture Capital, Dual-Use Tech, and Agile Startups Reshaped Defense** ](https://kintaronote.com/code-to-combat-how-venture-capital-dual-use-tech-and-agile-startups-reshaped-defense/). But [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) represents a particularly interesting next step. The story is no longer just about bringing software companies into defense. It is about bringing software thinking into physical warfare. What happens when soldiers stop asking how to operate the military they have and start asking how to rebuild it? That question is at the center of [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com), a German defense-tech company building autonomous unmanned ground vehicles and software designed to modernize military fleets. The company was founded in 2022 by three former German Bundeswehr officers: Marc Wietfeld, Stefan Roebel, and Maximilian Wied. Today, Wietfeld serves as CEO, Roebel as COO, and Wied as CFO. But the most interesting part of [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) is not the robots. It is the people who decided to build them. Three military officers looked at a system they knew from the inside and decided that some parts of it needed to change. That is a very different starting point from the typical technology startup. ## Marc Wietfeld: From Vocational Training to Military Innovation Marc Wietfeld is the person who started the idea that eventually became [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com). According to [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com), Wietfeld began working on the first prototype of a robot designed to assist soldiers on the battlefield and during training in 2021\. One year later, ARX Landsysteme — now [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) — was founded. What makes Wietfeld's background particularly interesting is that his career did not begin with the standard Silicon Valley founder story. He did not start as a computer-science prodigy building an app from a university dorm. He entered the Bundeswehr and developed his career inside the military before moving toward technology, innovation, and defense modernization. That background matters. A software entrepreneur can imagine what technology could do. A soldier has a different question: What actually works when people have to depend on it? That distinction helps explain the philosophy behind [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com). Wietfeld's idea was not simply to build another remote-controlled military vehicle. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) has increasingly positioned itself around autonomous systems, modular robotics, and software that can upgrade existing military platforms. In other words, the ambition is bigger than building a robot. It is about changing what a military vehicle can become. ## Stefan Roebel: The Operations Mindset Stefan Roebel is [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com)'s COO and another former Bundeswehr officer. His role is particularly important because building a defense company is not only an engineering problem. It is an execution problem. Military customers operate under very different constraints from consumer technology companies. A product has to work in harsh environments, integrate with existing systems, survive operational use, and eventually be produced and maintained at scale. Roebel's background combines military leadership with experience in high-growth businesses. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) describes him as responsible for turning the company's technology into an organization capable of scaling internationally. This gives [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) an interesting division of labor. Wietfeld is the founder and CEO who initiated the technology vision. Roebel focuses on execution and operations. And then there is the person responsible for something every startup eventually has to confront: money. ## Maximilian Wied: The Soldier Who Became [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com)'s CFO Maximilian Wied is [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com)'s CFO and one of the company's three co-founders. Like Wietfeld and Roebel, Wied previously served as an officer in the German Bundeswehr. His background also includes business administration and risk management, making him a natural fit for the financial side of a rapidly growing defense company. This is one of the things I find interesting about [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com). The three founders did not come from completely separate worlds and then randomly meet to build a robotics startup. They share a military background. That means the company's founding team started with something many technology startups have to learn later: an understanding of the actual user. The user is not a gamer. It is not a teenager with an iPhone. It is a soldier operating in an environment where a technological failure can have consequences far beyond a bad customer review. ## Why Build Ground Robots? The obvious question is: Why ground robots? Drones have become one of the most visible technologies of modern warfare. They can observe, strike, communicate, and carry out missions without putting a pilot directly in danger. But the ground is different. Soldiers still have to move equipment, carry supplies, investigate dangerous areas, and operate vehicles in environments where human presence can be extremely risky. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) focuses on this neglected layer of warfare. Its GEREON family consists of modular unmanned ground vehicles designed for different missions. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) describes GEREON as an autonomous and modular UGV platform that can be adapted to different configurations and missions. The company is also developing Mithra OS, an AI-powered operating system designed not only for new unmanned platforms but also for modernizing existing military vehicles. And this is where [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) becomes more interesting to me. ## [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) Is Not Just Building Robots If [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) were simply selling autonomous vehicles, I would consider it an interesting robotics company. But its larger ambition is different. Military forces already own enormous fleets of vehicles. Replacing all of them with completely new autonomous machines would be extraordinarily expensive and slow. So instead of asking: How do we replace the old fleet? [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) is asking: How do we make the existing fleet smarter? Mithra OS is part of that answer. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) says its software can integrate AI, sensors, networking, and autonomy into existing platforms, allowing militaries to modernize their fleets without replacing every vehicle. That is a very different business proposition. The hardware becomes the physical layer. The software becomes the intelligence layer. And the military fleet becomes something that can potentially be upgraded over time. This is why I think the more interesting story here is not military robotics. It is software-defined defense. ## Ukraine Turned the Idea Into a Real-World Test There is another reason [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) is worth watching: Ukraine. The war has become an enormous real-world test of unmanned systems. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) says its systems are already in use in Ukraine, and the company has been expanding its presence there. In 2026, [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) and Ukrainian robotics company Roboneers announced a joint venture called ARX Industries to manufacture unmanned ground vehicles at industrial scale in Germany and Ukraine. The companies said the facility aims to produce several thousand Rys Pro units in its first year and eventually scale to tens of thousands annually. That changes the nature of the company. A startup can build an impressive prototype in a laboratory. It is much harder to build something that soldiers actually use, learn from that deployment, modify the product, and then manufacture the next version at scale. [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) is trying to create exactly that feedback loop: battlefield → data → engineering → production → battlefield That may become one of the most important characteristics of defense technology in the coming decade. ## The Three Founders Have One Unusual Advantage There is a simple reason I find the [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) story more interesting than another AI startup story. The founders are not approaching defense as outsiders who discovered the industry because it suddenly became profitable. They came from the institution itself. They were soldiers. They experienced the limitations of military systems from the inside. Then they decided to build something different. That does not automatically mean [ARX](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) will succeed. Defense technology is notoriously difficult, and military procurement is not the same thing as selling software to consumers. But it does give the company an unusual starting point. The founders understand the problem they are trying to solve. ## The Bigger Question [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) began with a robot. But the company's long-term ambition appears to be much larger than a fleet of unmanned vehicles. It is trying to build a new layer of military infrastructure where vehicles, sensors, software, AI, and autonomous systems can work together. That raises a much bigger question: What happens when military capability becomes increasingly software-defined? For decades, upgrading an army often meant buying a new tank, a new truck, or a new weapons system. The software model is different. A vehicle can remain physically useful while its capabilities change through new sensors, new software, new autonomy, and new connections to other systems. That is the idea I find most interesting about [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com). The future battlefield may not simply be a place where more robots appear. It may be a place where the distinction between hardware and software starts to disappear. And if that happens, companies like [ARX Robotics](https://www.arx-robotics.com/?ref=kintaronote.com) may not just be building military robots. They may be building part of the operating system for the next generation of warfare.