Finnish deep tech firm Kelluu, which operates a fleet of autonomous hydrogen-powered airships, has closed a €15 million Series A funding round led by the NATO Innovation Fund.
Announced on April 14, 2026, the deal is the fund’s first investment in a Finnish company and reflects growing investor appetite for alternative intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms as NATO builds out its eastern flank posture.
Amsterdam and London-based venture capital firm Keen Venture Partners, Swedish defense-focused early-stage fund Gungnir Capital, and Finnish state-owned investment company Tesi joined the round. The raise follows Kelluu’s completion of two phases of the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), NATO’s technology acceleration program, which the company joined in 2024 after being selected from more than 2,600 applicants.
Kelluu designs, manufactures and operates unmanned hydrogen-lift airships that, according to the company, can remain airborne for more than 12 hours and fly in temperatures as low as minus 33 degrees Celsius. A single base operating five airships can cover around 30,000 square kilometers, an area comparable to Belgium. The platforms are designed to operate through sustained GNSS jamming, fly near-silently and produce no emissions, and the fleet has logged more than 50,000 kilometers of flight, including 12-hour missions in Arctic conditions along the Finland-Russia border.
Filling the ISR gap between satellites and drones
The investment rationale reflects a capability gap Western militaries have struggled to close. Satellites offer wide coverage but limited revisit times and resolution; drones deliver high-quality imagery but lose endurance in extreme weather and restricted airspace; fixed ground-based radars are vulnerable to kinetic strikes.
At the same time, hybrid operations, GNSS jamming and electronic warfare have become routine along Europe’s borders, a reality underscored by a series of drone incursions into Finnish airspace in late March 2026.
Persistent ISR has consequently moved up the list of NATO capability priorities, particularly along the Eastern Flank, in the maritime approaches, and in the High North.
“We built Kelluu at the edge of Europe, in one of the hardest operating environments outside conflict zones, because we believe that persistent aerial intelligence would become critical infrastructure, not just for defense, but for the resilience of entire countries,” Chief Executive Janne Hietala said in a statement. He added that the same fleet could simultaneously monitor power grids, detect wildfires, and generate data for machine learning applications.
NATO integration and field testing
Kelluu has accumulated a short but dense track record of operational demonstrations with allied forces. In February 2026, during Exercise Steadfast Dart 26 in Germany, a multi-domain exercise involving roughly 10,000 troops from 13 nations, the company integrated its sensor feed with the Maven Smart System, delivering live video and geolocation data to allied units. Weeks earlier, it participated in the NATO Innovation Range technical demonstration for the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line in Finland.
The company has also conducted exercises in Norway and with NATO Maritime Command (MARCOM). Its data platform is designed for STANAG compliance and plugs into allied command and control systems, a prerequisite for feeding the Common Operational Picture on which NATO air and ground commanders rely.
Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, Partner at the NATO Innovation Fund, said the platform “provides consistent coverage even when GPS is jammed or weather is harsh, at much lower cost than traditional systems.”
The fund, capitalized by 24 NATO allies, has previously invested in dual-use firms including German launcher startup Isar Aerospace.
A crowded airship space, validated in hard conditions
Kelluu is not alone in pursuing airship-based ISR. A growing cohort of startups and established players has explored persistent aerial platforms, from LTA Research, backed by Alphabet co-founder Sergey Brin, to French startup HyLight, which raised seed funding for smaller hydrogen-powered inspection airships. High-altitude platform stations (HAPS) and stratospheric balloons occupy adjacent niches.
What differentiates Kelluu, according to its investors, is the operational environment in which the platform has been validated.
“There is no shortage of balloon platforms claiming to fill this void, but none operate where Kelluu operates or under the conditions it has proven itself in,” said Giuseppe Lacerenza, Partner at Keen Venture Partners.
The company has positioned itself as a dual-use operator from inception, with its technology already deployed in civilian applications including forestry monitoring, meteorology, and smart-city sensing.
Kelluu AI Labs and the data flywheel
Alongside the funding, Kelluu announced Kelluu AI Labs, a unit aimed at developing what the company describes as “world foundation models” for the physical environment. Hietala argues that continuous sensor coverage generates proprietary datasets that compound with every flight hour.
Applied to defense, the company says such models could establish a baseline state for a given border region, allowing deviations to be flagged automatically. Similar approaches are being pursued for predictive maintenance of critical infrastructure and environmental early warning systems.
