Welcome to The Weekend Read, which will be delivered to your inboxes on Sunday mornings London time.
In February 2025, in the midst of that crazy week in Munich, I interviewed Auterion Founder and CEO Lorenz Meier on stage at The Future of Defence Tech Manufacturing & Innovation, the event we ran with the DIU. It is worth going back 18 months to reflect on that panel. It explored how startups can scale production more rapidly through partnerships with established industrial partners like Rhinemetall. Lorenz projected that Auterion would be capable of producing “a million drones that are ready to go at moments notice that provide credible deterrence in Europe.” You can watch the panel here.
Fast-forward to February 2026, Auterion and Airlogix signed an agreement solidifying a startup-to-startup partnership to scale defence tech manufacturing. That agreement became a reality, with the first 5,000 German-manufactured, Auterion-Airlogix drones being shipped to Ukraine this month. The deal with the German Ministry of Defence is reportedly worth $300M. Read an excerpt of our reporting below. Lorenz Meier, CEO and Founder of Auterion and Vitalii Kolesnichenko, CEO of Airlogix will be speaking about their partnership at Resilience Conference London.
The timing couldn’t be more critical. Ukrainians are experiencing terrible sustained attacks by Russia, with strikes targeting food supplies, government buildings, missile warehouses, and most frighteningly, civilian areas at random. They desperately need interceptors to fill the gap left by America’s stocks, which were depleted in Iran. They need more news like that of drone interceptor InLeap, which raised a €20M Seed round for counter-drone laser effectors. Read more from Managing Editor Ingrid Lunden excerpted below.
And lastly, we announced the Resilience Conference London 2026 agenda. It is the most impactful gathering of leaders in defence tech, and there are more speaker announcements to come, and tickets will sell out, so get yours today.
Airlogix and Auterion bag $300M AI-guided heavy strike drone deal
Ingrid Lunden, Managing Editor
Back in February, during the Munich Security Conference, we wrote about how German/Swiss/US startup Auterion and Ukrainian startup Airlogix were using the event to announce plans to mass produce AI-guided aerial systems. We’ve just found out that the deal is now yielding some tangible results.
The pair have started producing and delivering Auterion-powered Airlogix hardware: Anubis and Seth X airframes, respectively used for heavy and medium-range strikes. Resilience Media understands the government contract is worth $300 million. In total, more than 5,000 systems will be supplied, the companies said.
The companies say that this is the first time that Germany is producing precision strike systems on home turf. The benefit of them are that they typically cost a fraction of the larger systems they aim to replace in terms of firepower.
“Germany now has a production line for affordable precision mass,” said Lorenz Meier, the CEO and founder of Auterion, in a statement. “We are delivering fielded, proven systems this year, at a cost and rate that makes deterrence something you can actually stockpile.”
InLeap raises €20M for counter-drone laser effectors
Ingrid Lunden, Managing Editor
Drone interceptors are the name of the game right now in Europe, and today one of the companies building systems to defend against drone incursions has raised substantial early investment to expand its business.
InLeap Photonics, a German developer of precision laser-based systems that can incapacitate and take down drones, has closed a Seed round of €20 million, funding that it plans to use for R&D, production, sales and testing. This is on top of a pre-Seed of €2 million raised in 2025.
InLeap seems to have already hit some pretty significant milestones. It claims that its laser effectors have the capability to be used in urban environments with safety systems to help protect people’s eyes. It also says that its systems — currently with two models in the works, the InLeap Fastlight HELD and the InLeap Fastlight SHIELD — are capable of working at a distance of 3 kilometres and can target and incapacitate as many as 300 drones in a minute — potentially making them effective in counteracting swarms.
InLeap further says its laser beam steering works 2,500 times faster than other laser-based counter-drone solutions on the market.
This seed round was closed six months earlier than planned due to being ahead of time on development milestones, CEO and co-founder Marius Lammers told Resilience Media. All the same, he said that the first products are still in the testing phase and will not be on the ground until Q1 2027. First deployments, he added, would be in some key locations where there have been grey zone incursions, as well as in Western Ukraine.
The startup also has some important partnerships in place that could see it raising more money very soon. Specifically, it is already working with the German Federal Ministry of Defence (BMVg), the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub, and STARK — itself a key supplier to the Bundeswehr and the Ministry of Defence. InLeap said the funding will help it address what it describes as “strong market demand” at the moment.
“Our technology has reached the market and we are seeing strong order intake,” said Marius Lammers, InLeap’s CEO and founder, in a statement. “We are now investing in manufacturing, quality assurance, sales and service to meet demand and deliver our systems at greater scale.”
German investor UVC Partners is leading the round, with HTGF (also Germany), Balnord (Poland), Sentris (Estonia) and Scale Capital (Denmark) also participating. The list of backers speaks to the interest in good interceptor technology across the whole continent, and it will be worth watching how and if InLeap make the leap to working in other parts of Europe.
