The New Defense Post #15

Welcome back to the fifteenth edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we’ll cover:

This week, we’re excited to welcome our first guest writer: Anton Verkhovodov, long-time friend of EDTH and partner at D3 Ventures. Anton joins us to share what he has learned investing in Ukraine’s defense tech ecosystem and to outline where he believes the next big breakthroughs will happen.

Europe’s defense tech landscape is transforming at an unprecedented pace. Talent is flooding into the sector, new founders are emerging from engineering labs and hackathons, and governments are finally paying attention. Yet as capital and energy rush in, many teams are choosing the most crowded paths, especially drones.

After evaluating more than 700 startups across Ukraine and the EU, Anton sees a clear gap between what is popular and what the battlefield actually needs. The next decade of defense innovation will not be defined by building more platforms. It will be shaped by advances in autonomy and the electromagnetic spectrum.

Read the full interview on The New Defense Post

🗣 Klaus Rosenfeld, CEO, Schaeffler: The MoU is “a first important step” as Schaeffler expands into defence and contributes manufacturing expertise to bolster Germany’s capabilities. (Reuters)

📰 Our Take: Real deterrence does not come from building the marginally best drone, but from being the one who can build the most in an instant when it becomes necessary.

Helsing and other European neo-primes that reached sky-high valuations understood this. Late-stage investors also seem to be rewarding companies that understand supply chains and modular production. If you’re early and developing hardware, think about scaling potential immediately. If you haven’t begun yet, this may be the right moment to look into defense manufacturing.

The best weapon systems will be the ones you can produce with what is already available in a car manufacturing plant, so keep that in mind.

📰 Our Take: This is a strong signal that hypersonics may be entering a new phase of ‘good-enough-at-scale’ procurement, rather than remaining exclusively exquisite, boutique systems.

It is worth noting that hypersonic missiles are currently among the most significant threats we face, with very few air-defense systems capable of intercepting them. At the same time, Western countries do not have any operational hypersonic systems in active service.

This gap represents a serious weakness in our deterrence capabilities. Fortunately, companies such as Destinus are working to address this challenge, but we need more innovators to tackle it.

🗣 Dame Fiona Murray, Chair, NATO Innovation Fund: “Today's (Tuesday's) milestone signals a bold new chapter in India's journey toward self-reliance in next-generation defence technologies” (The Economic Times)

📰 Our Take: Beyond India-US defence ties, this is a useful case study for European drone and autonomy startups thinking about scale. The playbook here is not just building a good platform, but pairing it with a heavy-industrial partner that can localise supply chains, meet compliance requirements, and unlock major domestic procurement.

For European startups, India could become an attractive second home market for licensed production, subsystem supply, or joint bids, especially as New Delhi pushes self-reliance while still seeking globally proven tech.

The biggest concern, though, is their close friendship with Russia, which might make them an unreliable partner.

This section was written by Fynn van Rießen and edited by Paolo Trecate and Benjamin Wolba.

Russia’s invasion has turned Ukraine into the most heavily mined country on earth, with roughly a fifth of its territory potentially contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance. Clearing that by hand would take decades and cost tens of billions of euros (Business Insider). The scale alone is pushing demining away from slow, manual work toward robots, drones, and AI, which is how a new generation of startups is starting to matter.

Danish–Ukrainian startup Dropla Tech is a good example. It combines unmanned ground vehicles and drones with neural networks to detect mines and other explosive threats in real time, trying to make clearance faster, cheaper, and safer for sappers.

Mine Kafon in the Netherlands uses paired drones to map and scan contaminated land, building detailed hazard maps at a fraction of the cost of manual surveys. Ukrainian firm Ailand Systems now fields “Spinner TH”, an autonomous drone derived from its ST1 mine-hunting platform. And Lithuania’s Broswarm focuses on sensor payloads that can turn existing drone fleets into ad hoc mine detectors.

On the ground, startups are turning both small robots and heavy machinery into remote-controlled sappers. Rovertech’s “Zmiy” ground drone is the first domestically developed and certified remote demining vehicle in Ukraine, built to take humans out of the blast radius (Kyiv Independent). Tractor maker Gardarika Tres is converting ordinary agricultural vehicles into autonomous mine-clearance platforms that can roll through fields and detonate or till out anti-tank mines so farmers can return to work.

As The New Defense Post learned from background conversations with industry insiders, the truth is that no one will remove landmines anytime soon.

Most minefields sit close to the Russian border and play a central role in stopping future advances. Even after fighting slows down or may stop, large-scale removal is unlikely to happen rapidly because it would weaken the defensive depth that military planners still view as essential.

The idea of a large civilian market for mine clearance also runs into hard structural realities. Commercial humanitarian demining remains a heavily bureaucratic domain dominated by a small constellation of organizations and contractors.

But a new market has emerged on the battlefield: militaries need to clear mines to move infantry and armor, launch counterattacks, redeploy forces, or create temporary corridors for logistics. Speed, remote operation, and expendability matter more than exhaustive clearance.

That operational logic pushes innovation toward systems that integrate directly with command-and-control (C2) and battlefield management systems (BMS), feeding threat maps, clearance status, and mobility corridors into the planning loop in real time.

More intelligent, networked, and adaptive mines designed to sense, communicate, and influence maneuver may reshape how minefields are used as a tactical resource. But that is a story for another time.

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