Can Baltic startups enhance NATO air defenses in opposition to Russia? – DW – 10/28/2025 | EUROtoday

What would occur if Russia sends lots of of drones without delay into NATO airspace?

This nightly actuality in Russia’s conflict in Ukraine is a state of affairs the EU and NATO is scrambling to organize for after final month’s airspace incursions by Russia and alleged airport espionage throughout Europe.

Tomas Jermalavicius, a researcher on the International Center for Defense and Security in Tallinn, Estonia, says the radars of NATO member Estonia do not see incoming drones as a result of “they fly too low.”

“And we are also quite short on means to shoot them down that have a proportionate cost-benefit balance.” he advised DW.

Jermalavicius famous that the taking pictures down of Russian drones over Polish airspace on September 9 was a working example, as a result of missiles costing half one million {dollars} have been used in opposition to drones that price not more than $50,000 (€42,930).

Military specialists fear that this unsustainable “cost to kill ratio” of pricy interceptors in opposition to low cost drones might adversely influence NATO’s air defenses in a full-scale conflict.

To tackle this, Jermalavicius means that startups must be central to drone protection methods, particularly since drone assaults now trigger as much as 80% of casualties in fashionable warfare.

“Startups are disruptors of these lazy patterns that our procurement systems and our defense industrial players settle into over decades,” he argued, including that they’re wanted as a “thorn in the side of all these convenient arrangements” with a view to velocity up developments.

Frankenburg to the rescue?

One of the startups promising an reasonably priced — and scalable — anti-drone system is Estonia’s Frankenburg Technologies primarily based in Tallinn with workplaces within the UK, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Within lower than a yr, Frankenburg has developed an air-defense platform prototype which firm CEO Krusti Salm pitches as an answer to what he considers NATO’s “biggest vulnerability.”

“Everything that Russia launches at Ukraine and would potentially launch at European targets is by an order of magnitude cheaper than anything that we take them down with,” he advised DW.

According to Salm, the purpose of the mission is to make the Frankenburg system ten instances cheaper than current short-range air protection interceptors like US-made Sidewinders.

Frankenburg at the moment has one NATO nation as a buyer and hopes to quickly begin producing lots of of interceptor missiles per week with the assistance of a €4 million funding in March.

According to UK enterprise each day Financial Timesstartups specializing in drones and robotics have been attracting greater than half of all enterprise capital within the European protection sector since final yr.

It’s maybe no shock, then, that three of Europe’s 4 protection startups with a so-called unicorn market valuation of greater than €1 billion are drone makers —amongst them Germany’s Helsing and Quantum Systems in addition to Portugal’s Tekever.

‘Everybody and their mother has a drone startup’

While Western militaries have an obvious curiosity in cost-effective options like Frankenburg’s, there appears to be a sure diploma of warning amongst historically quite risk-averse militaries to spend money on largely unproven applied sciences.

“[Investors and defense ministries] want to buy a complete product with proven long-term support,” says Lithuanian Rytis Mikalauskas, CEO of the Harlequin Defense startup.

Jermalavicius believes the warning can be as a result of uncertainty round startups’ viability. “If I buy a lot of stuff from a startup and it goes belly up after two years, who will be the one maintaining capabilities, servicing them, providing spares, upgrading them?”

Another problem drone startups face is rising competitors, says Mikalauskas. “There’s been a running joke at defense events for over a year: ‘Everybody and their mom has a drone startup,'” he advised DW.

New drone startups popping up each week, it appears, additionally raises the query of whether or not the demand for drones in Europe is sufficient to quench the thirst to provide them?

The German navy, for instance, goals to safe a measly 8,300 drone programs by the top of the last decade — far fewer than different NATO nations.

But Kaspar Gering, co-founder of DarkStarthinks the priority is unfounded. The military-tech enterprise capital fund goals to deliver collectively experience from unicorn founders, navy veterans, buyers, and technical leaders

“Estonia has a €400 million, multi-year tender for loitering munition that includes specific types of drones,” Gering advised DW. “And drone-related tenders are trending upward across the EU.”

Countries on NATO’s jap flank like Estonia have began to faucet startups together with Frankenburg to assist construct out a so-called drone wall. The EU initiative is predicted to include radars, acoustic sensors, cellular cameras, jammers and drone interceptors.

Battle-tested in Ukraine?

Frankenburg and lots of different Western startups even have established hyperlinks to Ukrainian frontline items, permitting them to reply extra rapidly and precisely to continuously altering warfare than long-established protection corporations and startups with out these ties.

Frankenburg’s interceptor missiles, says Salm, “don’t have a single aspect that hasn’t been influenced by battlefield information from Ukraine.”

This type of unfettered entry is what separates the wheat from the chaff, says ICDS’s Jermalavicius.

“Ukrainians sit on a mountain of data gathered from drone operations, but they usually don’t share it with foreign defense tech companies due to martial law restrictions,” he stated. “So without close connections to military units, the question is to what extent the foreign products can properly reflect battlefield realities.”

‘Decisive benefit’

European startups’ capacity to make a distinction in heading off potential Russian drone assaults additionally hinges on EU governments slashing paperwork and offering the authorized framework for warfare already throughout peacetime, says Mykhailo Rudominsky, who co-founded Himera in 2022 — a Ukrainian defense-tech startup which manufactures digital warfare-resistant, safe tactical communication programs.

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we had to overlook several restrictive laws that were holding back the development of innovative defense solutions,” the 25-year-old says, calling on NATO nations to have “a set of laws ready for when the fighting starts to avoid their weapons being limited in functionality.”

The head of Estonia’s new Force Transformation Command, Ivo Peets, in the meantime, thinks the worth of drone startups lies in bringing a “specific ability to bear.”

“Their niche capability can be an advantage, even a decisive one,” Peets — a former platoon commander who served in Afghanistan — advised DW.

However, this benefit will ultimately “go away because the battlefield needs change,” he added, or the potential will develop into so efficient that “everyone adopts it, and it will be mass produced,” — which might possible not be finished by a startup.

Edited by: Uwe Hessler