The New Defense Post #29

Welcome back to the #29 edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we’ll cover:

Resoloon is a European defense-tech startup building a high-altitude imaging platform that sits between drones and satellites. The company is developing a balloon-based system that operates at around 30 km altitude and captures high-resolution imagery over very large areas, aiming to combine the coverage advantages of satellites with the sharper imaging and deployment flexibility of lower-altitude systems.

The startup is still very early, but it has already reached a point that many deep-tech companies struggle to get to: the prototype was working before the company was formally set up. Since then, the main challenge has been turning a functional technical concept into a legal, operational business capable of running pilots, raising capital, and beginning commercial deployment.

In this conversation, founder Domokos Kertész shares how his background in hardware and prototyping led to the idea, why the team is deliberately avoiding premature deployment in Ukraine, and why the company’s next milestone is not technology alone but revenue. He also explains how the startup raised €550K at an early stage and why founder networks around Project Europe and 20VC have already become strategically valuable.

Read the full interview on The New Defense Post

📰 Our Take: The interesting question is not whether Anthropic wins or loses this specific fight. It is whether defense customers will increasingly demand that frontier-model providers surrender control once their tools become embedded in the MoD’s systems.

The defense's use of AI was always going to run into this trap. Commercial labs want to preserve boundaries and align with internal values. Governments want control. Once these systems become critical infrastructure, that tension becomes structural.

This also creates new gaps. There may be room for a new generation of defense-native AI providers whose core advantage is not necessarily better models, but fewer policy constraints and tighter alignment with military use cases.

🗣 A statement signed by the two presidents said they had agreed to: "enable the ​production of Ukrainian defence systems and capabilities in Romania to strengthen the defence industries of Ukraine and Romania."(Reuters)

📰 Our Take: The real asset here is not just a drone design. It is a wartime production-and-learning loop in which you can always scale up production if the need arises.

That matters because Europe does not simply need more defense spending. It needs mechanisms to import combat-proven iteration speed into allied industrial bases. Romania is becoming one of the places where that may happen.

And that has second-order implications. Startups that can move across borders with software, manufacturing methods, and operator know-how may end up far more valuable than companies that only export finished products.

📰 Our Take: Everyone talks about autonomy as a software problem. In practice, it is also a data problem.

Ukraine is sitting on one of the most valuable real-world military datasets on the planet: ISR, electronic warfare data, target behavior, strike outcomes, and the messy edge cases that do not show up in peacetime testing.

Opening that data to allies could change who can build the best military AI stack over the next few years. Battlefield data is becoming a strategic asset in its own right.

In the next phase of defense tech, companies and countries with the best access to real operational data may have a greater advantage than those with “more drones”.

Ukraine and the Netherlands discussed expanding joint arms production, with Zelenskiy saying Ukraine would continue and expand joint weapons production and that Ukrainian interceptor-drone know-how could be valuable to partners beyond Europe. (Reuters)

Europe became the world’s largest arms importer over the 2021–2025 period, according to SIPRI data reported by Reuters, underscoring how much rearmament still depends on external supply. (Reuters)

The European Investment Fund committed €50M to Join Capital Fund III through the InvestEU Defence Equity Facility, its largest defense commitment so far. (EU)

A lot of defense-tech attention goes to the visible edge of the stack. Drones. Autonomy. Counter-UAS. AI software. Strike systems.

But none of those categories work especially well without one specific layer underneath them: Sensing.

That matters because modern defense is increasingly a problem of detection rather than a problem of decision. You cannot classify what you cannot see. You cannot intercept what you cannot track. And you cannot automate anything reliably if the system is feeding on weak, noisy, or incomplete inputs.

That is why advanced sensing is starting to look less like a supporting capability and more like a strategic one.

There are already some good startup examples in Europe.

Helsing is one. Its Lura platform is built around what the company calls a large acoustic model for the underwater battlespace, designed to process acoustic data at the edge and classify and localize vessel signatures in real time. Helsing says Lura can work with arbitrary acoustic sensors and be integrated onto existing or new platforms, which is exactly the kind of sensing-plus-software stack that can become horizontally valuable across naval surveillance and subsea infrastructure protection.

Another example is Alpine Eagle in Germany, which positions its counter-drone system around detecting, deciding on, and intercepting threats before they reach their targets. With onboard AI, sensor fusion, and computer vision, it is a good example of where sensing is going.

That is why advanced sensing looks so interesting right now. It is one of the few layers that matters across almost every major defense problem set: air defense, maritime awareness, counter-drone, autonomy, border security, and electronic warfare.

It is horizontal infrastructure for the modern battlefield. And from a startup perspective, that can be powerful because a company improving sensing can plug into multiple platforms rather than betting everything on a single end system.

The defense-tech market tends to reward what is easiest to see. Advanced sensing sits in the opposite category. It is often less visible, less marketable, and less intuitive to outsiders.

Which is exactly why it may be one of the most interesting areas to watch in Europe.

Love these insights? Forward this newsletter to a friend or two. They can subscribe to our website.