Welcome back to the #51 edition of The New Defense Post!

In this edition, we’ll cover:

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Photo Credit: Wild Hornets

Ukrainian drone maker Wild Hornets says its new STING S interceptor has shot down around ten Russian Geran-4 drones and several Geran-5s during combat trials. The company also published footage of the Rubin crew from Ukraine’s 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment intercepting a Geran-5. STING S is still being tested, and Wild Hornets has not released its final specifications. (Militarnyi)

Russia’s earlier jet-powered Geran-3 used the airframe of the slower, piston-powered Geran-2. The Geran-4 has a new, reinforced airframe and can reach up to 500 km/h, according to Ukrainian military intelligence. On September 26, President Zelenskyy said Ukraine had neutralized 55% of more than 2,730 jet-powered Shaheds launched that month, compared with more than 90% of regular Shaheds. (Ukrainian Defence Intelligence, Office of the President of Ukraine)

Wild Hornets told NV it began work on intercepting jet-powered drones in early 2026 and built STING S as a new product rather than a simple upgrade of the original STING. Most of its reported interceptions so far have used Hornet Vision Ctrl, which lets pilots operate interceptors remotely. In July, the company gave Ukrainian Air Force units 160 of these control systems for free. Wild Hornets plans to start serial production of STING S within a month after combat trials finish. (NV, Militarnyi)

🗣 Wild Hornets: “We expect this will make it possible to quickly scale up the use of the new interceptor.” (LB.ua)

📰 Our Take: In July, Wild Hornets gave Ukrainian Air Force units 160 Hornet Vision Ctrl systems. A STING interceptor is spent when it hits a target; the control station stays. It can be used with STING S too, and most of the new drone’s reported interceptions have used it.

Other defense startups should consider this when they can afford to give equipment away, and their next product will use the same setup. Wild Hornets can bring STING S to crews who already know the controls. That could make the new interceptor much quicker to put to work.

Photo Credit: DEUTZ AG

Munich-based ARX Robotics and German engine maker DEUTZ have delivered the first GEREON ground robots produced at DEUTZ’s Ulm plant to Ukraine. The first batch arrived twelve weeks after the companies announced the production ramp-up. (ARX Robotics)

GEREON is a modular unmanned ground vehicle that can carry up to 500 kilograms. ARX lists battlefield logistics, casualty evacuation, and surveillance among its uses. Earlier GEREON systems have been operating in Ukraine since the start of 2026. In May, ARX announced another order that would grow its Ukrainian fleet to several hundred robots. The Ulm batch is part of that expansion. (ARX Robotics, ARX Robotics)

ARX is also producing part of the order at its own plant in Ukraine, with local suppliers. In Ulm, DEUTZ brings manufacturing capacity, while ARX brings the vehicle design, software, and integration work. The companies signed their partnership in October 2025 and plan to increase production over the coming months. (ARX Robotics, DEUTZ, ARX Robotics)

🗣 Marc Wietfeld, ARX Robotics Co-Founder and CEO: “The question is how quickly we can move new technologies from development into production and ultimately into military use.” (ARX Robotics)

📰 Our Take: The ARX–DEUTZ partnership is one of the best examples we’ve seen of a European defense startup working with an established manufacturer to scale up production quickly. DEUTZ has invested in ARX and has started building GEREON in Ulm. Now, just twelve weeks after announcing the production ramp-up, the two companies have already delivered the first vehicles from that plant to Ukraine. (DEUTZ, ARX Robotics)

Estonian-Ukrainian DOD Solution closed a €1.8 million pre-seed round announced September 28. The company builds onboard computers and autonomy software for drones operating without reliable GPS or communications. It will use the funding to develop its AURA AI platform and make it easier for unmanned-system makers to integrate. (EU-Startups)

UK-based Applied AGI secured a £3 million investment led by Maven Capital Partners on September 22, with the Maven VCTs, Maven Cognition and angel investors taking part. The company builds AI-powered vision software that helps machines identify objects in poor visibility or with limited data. It already works with the UK Ministry of Defence, the Royal Air Force and Leonardo. (BusinessCloud)

Sweden’s TERASi raised €11 million in a seed round announced September 22, co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund and JOIN Capital. The KTH spinout builds millimeter-wave systems for tactical communications and plans to expand deployments and its engineering team with the funding. (TERASi)

TEKEVER announced on September 23 the first close of a Series D planned to total US$580 million, led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford, at a US$6.4 billion valuation. The company says the first close covers a majority of the round but did not disclose the exact amount raised so far; further closings are expected. (TEKEVER)

Image Credit: © ESA

Europe wants more control over the satellite services it depends on. EOGS is about seeing, a shared system for Earth observation that reduces reliance on foreign satellite imagery for security and defense decisions. IRIS² is about talking, a secure constellation meant to do for European government communications what Starlink does for Ukraine's, without a foreign company able to switch it off.

Running both at once is not new for this newsletter's readers. We have already covered the launch side of this same push: Isar Aerospace reaching orbit, ESA's European Launcher Challenge, the Airbus-Thales-Leonardo satellite merger fighting over how the hardware gets built. What is different this time is that EOGS and IRIS² are not about hardware or launch vehicles at all. They are about who gets to operate the resulting service, and on whose terms outside countries get to plug into it.

That is a genuinely harder problem than building a rocket. A launch vehicle either reaches orbit or it does not. A shared governmental service has to decide who controls the data, who pays for what share of it, and what happens when a member state's priorities do not match Brussels's.

ESA funding two competing consortia to study EOGS's architecture, rather than picking one company and moving fast, suggests officials know this and are not in a hurry to get it wrong. Whether that caution produces a system that actually works by the early 2030s, or just a decade of parallel studies, is still an open question.

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