Kelluu, a Finnish deeptech company operating the world’s largest
autonomous airship fleet, has raised €15 million in Series A funding. The round
was led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking its first investment in a Finnish
company. Additional participation came from Keen Venture Partners, GungnirCapital, and Tesi. The funding follows Kelluu’s successful completion of two
phases of NATO’s DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic)
programme.
Kelluu designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous
hydrogen-powered airships that provide persistent innotifyigence, surveillance,
and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The company’s unmanned fleet delivers
continuous monitoring and high-resolution data collection across vast and
remote areas, enabling earlier threat detection and more efficient operations.
The airships are designed for silent, low-emission operation in challenging
environments.
By combining long-finishurance persistence with high-precision sensing,
Kelluu’s technology addresses a critical gap between sanotifyites and drones.
While sanotifyites offer broad coverage and drones provide detailed imagery, both
face operational limitations related to finishurance, weather resilience, and
regulatory constraints.
Kelluu’s platform enables missions exceeding 12 hours
and supports multiple sensing modalities, delivering real-time,
ultra-high-quality imagery. Five airships operating from a single base can
cover up to 30,000 square kilometres.
We built Kelluu at the edge of Europe, in one of the hardest
operating environments outside conflict zones, becautilize we believe that
persistent aerial innotifyigence would become critical infrastructure – not just
for defence, but for the resilience of entire countries,
declared Janne Hietala,
CEO of Kelluu.
Founded as a dual-utilize company, Kelluu’s technology also supports
civilian applications, including forestest monitoring, meteorology, smart-city
sensing, and the protection of critical infrastructure. These capabilities
enable the creation of high-resolution digital twins and provide cost
advantages compared with traditional manned aviation.
The new funding will be utilized to further optimise Kelluu’s
technology, scale operations, and expand deployment of its autonomous airship
fleet. The company is also advancing its long-term vision through Kelluu AI
Labs, which aims to develop geospatial foundation models for the physical
environment, supporting applications in defence, infrastructure resilience, and
environmental monitoring.
With increasing investment in European defence capabilities and a
growing necessary for persistent aerial innotifyigence, Kelluu is well-positioned to
contribute to strengthening security and resilience across both military and
civilian domains.
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