Kelluu, the Finnish deeptech startup operating a fleet of autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for persistent aerial surveillance, has raised €15 million in a Series A round led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking the fund’s first investment in a Finnish company.
Keen Venture Partners, Gungnir Capital, and Finnish state investment firm Tesi also participated. The raise follows Kelluu’s completion of two phases of NATO’s DIANA programme, making it one of the most operationally validated defence startups to emerge from Northern Europe in recent years.
Kelluu was founded in 2018 by Janne Hietala, Jiri Jormakka, and Jouni Lintu. Each Kelluu airship measures 12 metres in length and uses hydrogen both as a lifting gas and as a fuel cell power source. That physics gives it an operational endurance that battery-powered drones cannot match.
Flights of 12 hours are standard; the platform has operated in temperatures as low as -33°C and performs reliably in GPS-denied and electronically jammed environments, conditions it encounters routinely near Joensuu.
The sensor payload, with up to 5kg, can include LiDAR for 3D mapping, thermal cameras, and multispectral imaging. Onboard AI stitches sensor data into georeferenced digital twins in near real time, covering areas up to 300km in diameter. The system operates beyond the visual line of sight, fully autonomously, with no pilot required.
Five airships operating from a single base can monitor approximately 30,000 square kilometres, positioning Kelluu as a cost-effective alternative to both persistent manned surveillance aircraft and satellite tasking for high-revisit coverage.
On the civilian side, Kelluu sells data and intelligence as a service. On the defence side, NATO allies purchase systems outright. Real-world civilian deployments include monitoring tailings ponds and pit walls for Terrafame, Finland’s nickel and zinc miner, and forestry single-tree analytics in Sweden. Defence deployments include five live NATO missions and exercises with air forces from the US, UK, France, and Finland.
Its direct competitors include Sceye, Joby Aviation, and Archer Aviation. What Kelluu can point to, which most cannot, is operational proof in genuinely hostile electronic environments. The DIANA Phase 2 validation, a live NATO mission record, and the Janes-confirmed deployment 100km from the Russian border collectively constitute a credibility stack that investor presentations cannot manufacture.
What comes next
New capital will fund further technology optimisation, fleet scale-up, and continued operational delivery across civilian and defence verticals.
“Kelluu offers NATO nations persistent, wide-area monitoring and data gathering in challenging environments. Their platform provides consistent coverage even when GPS is jammed, or weather is harsh — at much lower cost than traditional systems — opening up new possibilities for aerial intelligence,” says Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, Partner, NATO Innovation Fund.