This founder left Silicon Valley to challenge the American defense supremacy from Athens, and investors pay attention to Techcrunch

In the summer of 2021, Dimitrousous Kottas made a step that would be incomprehensible to most Silicon Valley engineers: after having left his coveted position at Apple’s Special Projects Group, he picked up his life in California and moved back to Athens to start a defense company.

Three and a half years later, his startup, Delian Alliance Industrieshas set up driven monitoring tower on solar energy that guard some of the boundaries of Greece around the clock and detect forest fires on remote islands, together with a pipeline of other products, including hidden sea-based zeedones that are designed to keep enemies at a distance.

But Kottas’ most ambitious gamble is not on a certain technology – it is really that a small Greek startup can break through the notoriously fragmented defense market in Europe.

This may seem less a gamble today, especially since Defense Tech has never been hotter, but Kottas’ path to Delian has been a long work in performance, as he told this editor about a recent zoom call.

After earning recognition for his academic work at the University of Minnesota GPS-invested navigation – Research that he says was cited more than 1400 times – he came to Apple in 2016, where he worked for six years on autonomous systems with cameras, Lidars and Radars. Although he said that he cannot discuss details because of confidentiality agreements, the technologies he co -developed at Apple’s Secretive Division clearly helped to inform Delian building.

“The core of autonomy is perception,” Kottas explained, descriptively how machines should not only understand where objects are, but what they do and what they intend to do. “This is in the heart of autonomy, and given autonomy, the core of all future weapon systems will be, that is the core technology that changes the defense industry in the next decade.”

However, it was not only technological insight that his career change yielded. A series of geopolitical events looking at the conflict of Armenia-Azerbaijan; see that countries want to revise their surrounding boundaries; And acknowledge how far behind the European soldiers had fallen – he had started to gnaw. “I literally lost sleep,” he said.

Instead of trying to build the next generation fighter jet, Kottas started with something pragmatic that he could sell more immediately: surveillance towers. The move was apparently torn from the playbook of the eight-year-old armor Anduril, who started with software-augmented surveillance towers that it sold to American customs and border protection.

But Delian products reveal larger ambitions. The “Interceptigon” series contains hidden autonomous air and sea drones and barrels that are designed to lie slumbering until the threats appear.

The most striking example is a suicide ship of two meters that is packed in a cylinder and is used months in advance on the seabed on the depths where satellites and drones cannot detect it. When it is activated at a distance, it seems “out of nowhere to the enemy”, Kottas told Techcrunch and added that Delian patented this approach, which uses commercial material to produce the weapons on “large and really low costs”.

It is a model that, according to Kottas, does not exist elsewhere in the Western defense industry. It has also attracted investors who gave Delian just $ 14 million in financing. Indeed, the startup has announced on Tuesday that its earlier Backers, Air Street Capital and Marathon Venture Capital, have led his latest capital infusion, which brings the total financing of Delian to $ 22 million so far.

Here the story of Kottas is becoming more complicated. Despite the technological performance of Delian and operational success in Greece, the broader European market remains a formidable challenge. American officials are reportedly Busy European countries to keep buying weapons from American outfits. Furthermore, European countries have long been preferred their own soil companies, a tendency that, according to some investors, will make it difficult for startups such as Delian to scale across borders.

“That care is currently stronger in France,” Kottas acknowledged, although he claimed that the landscape is changing. And as proof that fragmentation is overcome, he pointed to initiatives from the European Union such as Safe And Council EuropeDesigned to encourage cross -border defense cooperation.

The proof, he maintained, is already on the rise, with companies such as Portugal’s Tekever that reaches unicorn statusAnd the quantum systems of Germany that compete worldwide. “There are companies that have been raised […] A tenth of what their American competitors have raised, and they competed on the exact same market, and won the European counterpart. “

Of course the question is what Kottas thinks of Anduril is, and the founder is respectful, although not intimidated. “It is definitely a generation company that will inspire many founders and military officers around the world,” he said.

But he warned to hire early winners. “Where we are now, it is as 2015 for self -driving cars […] Imagine that you try to predict the winner then. “

Nevertheless, the question remains whether a Greek startup – no matter how innovative – can convince French, German or British defense institutions to bet their national security on foreign technology. Kottas recently made an offer for a German tender, a test case for his statement that European fragmentation can be overcome by superior technology and competitive prices.

In the meantime, what Kottas can distinguish from many defense entrepreneurs is how personal the mission feels. Referring to the American space and defense giant Lockheed Martin, Kottas thought that “it is different to build weapons in New Mexico that will be used on the other side of the planet,” he reflects. “That is one mentality, [but] It is different to build something that you know it can be used to save your brother or sister or your neighbor. “

This sentiment can prove the largest possession of Delian, as it is shared by entrepreneurs throughout Europe who do not regard conflict as an abstract possibility, but as a lived reality. It drives the company’s focus on cheap, rapidly deployable systems that can be built on a scale and explains the emphasis on technology that can be positioned and activated in advance when needed. It can ultimately convince other European countries that geography is more important than nationality when it comes to defense.

Anyway, the unconventional journey from Athens from Athens to Minneapolis to Apple and back to Athens, suggests that he feels comfortable with long opportunities.

The founder believes that there is a “advantage of building a company” in a smaller market on a continent known for its fragmentation. “It forces you to be more resilient, more efficient and to concentrate ruthlessly on building great technology for a very low price, what matters in this company.”

“I think fragmentation will be overcome in the coming years, and you can change it to your advantage if you play it well.”