Volander Brings Commercial Drone Tech Onto the Battlefield

Volander founder Ross Drinkwater appeared on the Launch at Resilience Conference stage in 2024. As we near the application deadline for the 2025 cohort, we wanted to share an update on Volander and Drinkwater. Apply for the Launch showcase here; applications close on June 7, 2025.

A former Royal Marine, Ross Drinkwater, grew disillusioned with the state of defence technology after years of evaluating underperforming systems in the field. To address this, he founded Volander in March 2023. His mission: to bring state-of-the-art technology to the battlefield more quickly and precisely than ever before.

The startup was born not in a boardroom, but on the back of real operational experience—an effort to fill the widening capability gap between commercial promises and military realities.

“The combination of the best engineers in Europe with ex-military who have actually worked on these systems plus real operational experience is part of the ’secret sauce’ that is in the Volander DNA and contributed to our successes so far,” said Drinkwater.

The founding team reflects this ethos. After going solo in the early days—funding the company by selling his house—Drinkwater quickly brought on Toby Nightingale, a product engineer with a background spanning motorsport, broadcast, and communications. The pair was later joined by Rich Warner, a fellow veteran of the Royal Marines Future Commando Force program. Together, they had led teams focused on autonomous systems, loitering munitions, and battlefield communications. Today, the company operates with a lean leadership core and a rotating group of five to twelve engineers, depending on project needs.

Volander has already proven itself commercially, generating nearly $5 million in contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence and Leonardo UK. The company is now in the midst of a funding round to accelerate the productisation of its first three systems: the HK2 armed UAV, a proprietary electromagnetic launch rail, and the SAC360 UAV optics system. Three additional systems remain in development.

“Volander are building the systems and payloads capable of being delivered at scale for high intensity war, capable of prevailing in the most atrocious conditions,” said Drinkwater.

Volander is not just another drone company. The team views the drone body as commoditised—the real differentiation lies in payloads and support systems. Their proprietary communications, optics, and launch systems are designed to be not only more capable than current alternatives, but also radically more cost-effective. The company’s UXVs (uncrewed systems) are engineered to survive and operate in high-intensity conflict zones, offering resilience and flexibility that off-the-shelf options lack.

The startup’s core motivation is both strategic and deeply personal: to restore capability to a weakened European defence industrial base and to build tools that actually work under fire. In an environment where battlefield performance often lags behind glossy demos, Volander is staking its future on one promise—rugged, operationally tested, and scalable systems, ready for the wars that are already here.

“Volander was started due to the opportunity to help fix the atrophy on the European industrial base, but also out of frustration having worked and trialled a number of VC backed and large/established companies systems in field trials with the Royal Marines, where nearly all of this equipment fell short of doing what was promised,” said Drinkwater. If he has his way, however, all that changes with his future warfighting tech.