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A former Apple engineer who worked in the iPhone maker’s secret robotics lab has launched a start-up based in Athens focused on maritime defence, in the latest example of former Silicon Valley staffers turning to military technology.
Delian Alliance Industries is mimicking the vertically integrated approach taken by Tesla and Apple to develop autonomous weapons, including aerial and sea-based drones, as well as surveillance towers, much more cheaply than the traditional leading defence contractors.
Delian has raised $14mn in funding to expand internationally and try to challenge incumbent defence “primes” such as BAE Systems, Airbus, Rheinmetall, Saab and Leonardo.
“It is very rare when there is a time when new primes are created,” said Dimitrios Kottas, Delian’s co-founder and chief executive. “If that window existed [at any point] over the last several decades, it would be now. My prediction is that in the next decade there will be a technological race that will transform the way war is conducted in the west.”
Delian is manufacturing its own hardware, software and sensor fusion systems, rather than partnering with traditional defence groups as some other start-ups have done, so that it can move more quickly than its established competitors, Kottas said.
“Our competitor is time,” he said. “Our adversaries are developing and procuring things at speeds we cannot imagine . . . Our [national security] processes cannot support such speeds right now because they are tuned for peace time.”
Kottas is the latest example of entrepreneurs leaving more conventional tech companies to move into the defence market at a time when many countries, especially in Europe, are increasing their military spending at a time of heightened global tensions.
Anduril, a leading US defence start-up, was founded by Palmer Luckey, who previously sold his virtual reality headset company Oculus to Meta. Germany’s Helsing, which was recently valued at €12bn, is led by a biologist-turned-video games developer and an ex-McKinsey consultant, and is chaired by music app Spotify’s co-founder Daniel Ek.
Like Helsing and Anduril, Delian also drew in talent from Palantir, the data analytics group that works extensively with governments in the US and Europe as well as corporate clients.
After working in Apple’s secretive special projects group, the team most closely associated with its now-cancelled car project, Kottas moved back to his home country of Greece in 2021 to launch Delian after tensions between Greece and Turkey around the Aegean Sea began to escalate.
Delian is already selling its sensor fusion technology to the Greek army, as well as to civilian authorities for fire detection and environmental monitoring. Kottas said the start-ups’ target market was western-aligned “middle powers” that lacked the defence budget of larger nations such as the US.
While there was a “very saturated” market for expensive airborne drones, Kottas said, “the maritime domain is under-appreciated right now in the industry”.
“The use case we have in the Aegean, which is a use case of a nation defending small islands from a nearby revisionist power . . . that is very common across many nations,” he said, pointing to Asian markets such as India, South Korea and Singapore, as well as northern Europe.
Kottas said that while working in Silicon Valley he had learnt the value of so-called “moonshot” projects, which set extremely ambitious targets in order to speed technical innovation.
The company, which manufactures its products at its facility just outside Athens, recently showed off prototypes of its kamikaze-style Interceptigon unmanned autonomous systems. These involve fixed-wing drones or jet-ski-style boats carrying explosives launching from concealed locations to intercept naval or aerial attacks.
Nathan Benaich, investor at Air Street Capital, which is leading Delian’s latest funding round alongside Greece-based Marathon Venture Capital, said that the company’s integrated approach to product development was vital to creating a powerful deterrent. “Software alone is not going to protect your border and your citizens,” he said. “You really have to have integrated hardware, software and manufacturing in the same company. I don’t believe in doing a retrofit.”
