The New Defense Post #4

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

In this edition, we’ll cover:

The Ukrainian startup Falcons, founded in 2022, has just secured investment from U.S. fund Green Flag Ventures.

They develop electronic warfare (EW) systems capable of detecting enemy drones, communications equipment, and other EW assets by tracking their radio signals. Its flagship product, ETER, has already helped destroy a Russian system valued at about $90 million.

With the funding, Falcons will scale up production of ETER, aim for NATO certification, and push into allied markets.

This matters because such systems are increasingly critical on modern battlefields, especially given Russia’s use of drones and electronic warfare against Ukraine. It also reflects growing international investor confidence in local Ukrainian defense innovation.

🗣 Gundbert Scherf, Co-CEO, Helsing: “ARX is leading the field in unmanned ground systems. By strengthening the land domain together, we are delivering on Helsing’s promise: to protect European democracies through technological superiority.” (Helsing)

🗣 Marc Wietfeld, CEO, ARX Robotics: “With Helsing, we have found the best-in-class partner to create technological step-changes in the European defence sector… to give European and Ukrainian armed forces a technological advantage.” (Helsing)

📰 Our Take: When two of Europe’s best-funded defense tech startups decide to collaborate, it’s hard not to notice. Collaboration between defense tech startups to bring comprehensive solutions to European Ministries of Defense might be the right way forward to get the “big contracts”.

Plus, this is an interesting move for Helsing, which may be aiming to integrate more third-party systems into its Altra platform alongside its own proprietary products. Becoming a unified battle management system appears to be their play, and they’re pursuing it through strategic partnerships.

🗣 Sethu Saveda Suvanam, ReOrbit’s CEO: “This investment enables us to meet growing demand, ensuring that nations can operate critical space systems independently and with full control. In today’s geopolitical environment, reliance on external parties is a risk no country can accept. ReOrbit ensures they never have to.” (Add source)

📰 Our Take: This is a win for Europe’s (much-needed) strategic autonomy push in space.

Space is critical — and the war in Ukraine has shown it. Starlink's low Earth orbit internet connections greatly enabled and often improved Ukraine’s naval drone attacks. And without U.S. satellite intelligence sharing, environmental awareness on the battlefield would have been severely limited.

More broadly, what if the U.S. cut off access to its satellite network to its allies? That’s not a scenario Europe should worry about. ReOrbit, hopefully, will help address this vulnerability in conjunction with the EU's Galileo and IRIS² programs.

🗣 Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General: “I think what we have seen last night was a very successful reaction by NATO and Allies, including, of course, Poland itself, but also the Dutch, the Italians, and the Germans, everybody involved. And I'm really impressed.” (European Commission)

📰 Our Take: The author is not “very impressed”: a disproportionate amount of resources has been spent to counter cheap drones. What NATO is doing to protect against cheap drones is using a sniper rifle to kill a mosquito.

The cost-exchange ratio for downing those drones was likely in the multimillion-dollar range. An AIM-9 costs around €400k apiece; at least three were shot, while a Geran costs in the low tens of thousands.

There are startups working on cost-effective ways to defeat these threats—such as Alpine Eagle and Nordic Air Defense. With the money spent on this single interception, a Series A for a European counter-UAS startup might have been financed.

In Germany, the land forces’ battle-readiness as of February 2025 has dropped to about 50%, down from ~65% before 2022, due to donations to Ukraine, shortages in manpower, and delays in procurement of key systems. (Reuters)

We attended DSEI, where the majority of exhibitors were primes, with a few new defense startups also present. Many of the drones and the booths looked just the same. But you can expect it when you have to reserve your location years in advance and pay a small fortune to expose your products, which is something scrappy startups are unlikely to join.

What was interesting was the deal-making that happened there, though. First, the Helsing X ARX partnership was announced, which we covered in the Spotlight section.

Other deals include UK cargo-drone maker Windracers, which signed an MoU with India’s Bharat Forge to localise and deploy the ULTRA UAV for defence logistics across India (Windracers). UK SME Autonomous Devices teamed with Thales to co-develop EW-UAS1, a drone-based electronic-warfare platform for naval and land forces (Thales). Skyports Drone Services partnered with Quantum Systems to launch “Overwatch,” an ISR-as-a-service offering that marries Quantum’s UAS/payloads with Skyports’ operational layer.

Hypersonic missiles are missiles or glide vehicles that may fly faster than Mach 5 and maneuver within the atmosphere, typically in two flavors: hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) boosted by rockets and then gliding, and hypersonic cruise missiles (HCMs) powered by scramjets.

Their speed and unpredictable flight paths reduce warning times and complicate tracking. But they are not unstoppable.

On the effector side, venture-backed players are pushing the tech envelope: Hermeus flew its Quarterhorse Mk 1 as a stepping stone toward a hypersonic testbed; Venus Aerospace completed the first U.S. flight test of a rotating-detonation rocket engine aimed at high-Mach aircraft; and Europe’s Destinus is pursuing hydrogen-powered high-speed prototypes.

To counter incoming Hypersonic effectors, a layered sensing-to-intercept system is necessary, and it is being rapidly deployed in space. The U.S. MDA/SDA launched HBTSS demo satellites to provide birth-to-death infrared tracking of advanced missiles, feeding data to future interceptors.

So far, this threat has primarily come from China and Russia—China's aim is to neutralize U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific using these weapons, while Russia is already deploying hypersonic missiles in its attacks on Ukraine.

Europe and the United States do not yet have fully operational hypersonic missiles, which is a big problem for our deterrence credibility. Plus, we have a few air defense systems capable of intercepting them, which is also deeply worrying.

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