The Finnish deep tech company, which operates the world’s largest autonomous airship fleet, has closed a Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund, the Fund’s first investment in a Finnish company. Its airships can cover 30,000 square kilometres from a single base and have been tested in live NATO exercises.
Kelluu, a Finnish deep tech company that operates autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for persistent surveillance and intelligence gathering, has raised €15 million in a Series A round. The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund, the venture fund backed by 24 NATO member states, in what the Fund describes as its first investment in a Finnish company.
Also participating are Amsterdam and London-based VC firm Keen Venture Partners, Swedish early-stage defence-focused VC Gungnir Capital, and Tesi, the Finnish state-owned investment company.
The funding will support further optimisation of Kelluu’s technology and scaling of its deployed science engineering team.
The company designs, manufactures, and operates near-silent, emission-free hydrogen-lift airships that can operate in temperatures as low as -33°C, through sustained GNSS jamming, and in the extreme conditions of the Arctic. Five airships operating from a single base can cover 30,000 square kilometres, an area equivalent to Belgium.
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The fleet has logged over 50,000 kilometres of flight, including 12-hour Arctic missions. Unlike satellites, which cover large areas at low resolution and infrequent revisit rates, and unlike drones, which cannot sustain long endurance or operate reliably in extreme cold, Kelluu’s airships fill the gap between the two: continuous presence, high-precision sensing, and resilience in the environments where conventional platforms fail.
The investment follows Kelluu’s completion of two phases of NATO’s DIANA programme, the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, having been selected from over 2,600 applicants as one of 15 companies.
In February 2026, during Exercise Steadfast Dart 26 in Germany, a ten-thousand-troop, 13-nation multi-domain NATO exercise, Kelluu completed a real-time integration with the Maven Smart System, delivering live video and geolocation data directly to allied forces.
The company has also demonstrated persistent aerial autonomy at the NATO Innovation Range Technical Demonstration for the Eastern Flank Deterrence Line in Finland, and has conducted exercises with NATO Maritime Command.
Kelluu’s platform is designed for dual-use from the ground up. Its civilian applications include forestry monitoring, meteorology, and smart-city sensing.
The company is also developing Kelluu AI Labs, an initiative focused on building world foundation models for the physical environment, a geospatial data flywheel where, in the words of CEO Janne Hietala, every flight hour and sensor pass compounds into datasets that are difficult to replicate.
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