Finland may not be the first country that comes to mind as a defense hotspot, but sharing an 800-plus-mile border with Russia helps kick things into gear.
Earlier today, Kelluu, a Finnish autonomous ISR-focused airship startup, announced a €15M ($18M) Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund. The company says it will use the money to expand globally, scale up its airship fleet, and build out its own geospatial AI platform.
Might want to keep our eyes on our friends in the high north.
Eyes in the sky: Given it’s based near the Russian border in eastern Finland, Kelluu has a bit of a personal stake in keeping track of what’s happening along NATO’s longest border with their not-so-friendly neighbor.
The company’s hydrogen-powered airships surveil vast areas—five of them operating from a single base can cover an area the size of Belgium—and sensors and software onboard create digital twins of terrain to help NATO persistently monitor long borders and remote regions.
- Their airships can operate for over 12 hours in temperatures as low as -27.4°F and through sustained jamming.
- They’ve also built their own C2 platform that they’ve integrated into the ever-so-popular Maven Smart System and other C2 systems used by NATO forces.
- Kelluu was a member of NATO’s defense accelerator (DIANA) cohort last year, and has gone through two phases of the program and a whole lot of exercises across the alliance.
In the age of flashy drone fighters, blimp-esque airships aren’t exactly the most sexy of the unmanned systems coming onto the defense tech scene, but they fill a pretty important ISR gap.
“When people first hear about airships, it’s like, ‘That’s cool, but what do I do with this?’” Kelluu CEO Janne Hietala told Tectonic. “When we go to these exercises, users actually see that we’re able to provide significantly more air time, operate in high wind environmental conditions, and outperform other platforms in icy conditions, and that’s ultimately solving these problem sets that customers have.”
Cold hard cash: That’s led to a lot of traction with NATO end-users and caught the eye of the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), the alliance’s VC fund backed by 24 member countries, which made Kelluu its first investment in Finland.
“We see the Arctic as a collective security issue because it’s home to potential trade routes and is becoming a more contested environment,” NIF partner Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky told Tectonic. “Kelluu basically went all the way through the NATO innovation stack—they started at DIANA, participated in NATO exercises, and received funding from NIF. It’s a great example of the NATO innovation ecosystem, not just the NIF, working hand in hand to drive capabilities.”
Arctic ambition: With €15M ($18M) in fresh funding from NIF—along with Keen Venture Partners, Swedish VC Gungnir Capital, and Finnish state-owned investment company Tesi—Kelluu has its eyes on new markets—including North America—and new capabilities.
- Kelluu’s planning to launch a second-generation version of their airship with the same form factor but a multi-day flight time later this year.
- They’re also working on an in-house geospatial AI platform called Kelluu AI Labs, a foundational AI model trained on data collected by its airship sensors.
“We’ve demonstrated our capability to provide that aerial autonomy in places where pretty much nothing else survives, so when we look at a lot of the unmanned systems being developed, very few are actually solving this cross-section of problems,” Hietala said. “Some people have told me that we might be doing too much, but [at this point in time], this is exactly the right moment to do as much as you can, and we’re pushing new technology into the field much faster, ramping up manufacturing capacity, capabilities, and expanding operations.”