From Export Licences to Ground-Effect Drones: Day Two at the European Defense Tech Festival

Neuhardenberg, 21 August 2026

The second day of the European Defense Tech Festival at Neuhardenberg airfield, east of Berlin, split neatly in two. The morning belonged to people who help defence startups survive, a software house with an investment arm, a venture studio, a trade-law boutique and a fundraising adviser. The afternoon belonged to demonstrations on the apron, almost all of them drones, and to a pitch session that confirmed counter-UAS as the theme of the week. Swiss Aerospace Ventures was on site; here is what mattered.

The venture studio that builds hardware

Bifrost Defence, presented by Dr. Eugenie Wirz, is a Copenhagen-based venture studio, not a fund, not an accelerator, but a company that builds other companies. Founded in 2025 within Bifrost Studios with roughly €2 million of initial capital, it now counts around eight ventures across UAVs, UGVs, USVs, mobile infrastructure and aerostats. Its thesis is that three things should never be built twice, engineering, production and network, so every venture after the first starts further along.

The founder-life slide drew knowing laughter: expectation is idea, hackathon, demo, investment, production, scale; reality is forty-seven slides, no sleep, ninety seconds on stage, "great question", an unsigned NDA and "not what you demoed". Wirz's warning was that the hackathon is the easy part; shared infrastructure costs constant coordination across every company at once.

The studio's showcase, Thor's Haven, was parked outside: a towable command centre with three workstations, a 10 kWh power bank and hybrid inverter, diesel heating and air conditioning, built on a 2,000 kg braked chassis. Variants serve as stabilisation points, dental clinics, CASEVAC modules, drone control points and drone production units, and are already in service with Ukrainian forces. Bifrost is looking for co-investors and partners. Contact: ew@bifrostdefence.com.

Software, and money, for embedded defence systems

KDAB, represented by Chief Commercial Officer Till Adam, is a 100-person software consultancy specialising in Qt, C++ and 3D for embedded and desktop systems. Its defence references include RF direction finders and antenna switch matrices, submarines, aircraft, BSI-grade encryption and, most visibly, the rugged controller and Qt 6/QML user interface for ARX Robotics' Gereon unmanned ground vehicle, with controller, robot communication over multiple networks and offline autonomous mapping. KDAB also names Motor AI, the Berlin autonomous-shuttle company, among its autonomy clients.

Less expected was the closing slide: KDAB runs an investment arm at family-office level, writing angel, pre-seed and seed cheques into European deep-tech founders with product business models, especially where its software capability and vertical access can help. Decks go to till.adam@kdab.com.

Export control as a licence to operate

The most sobering session came from BLOMSTEIN, the Berlin boutique founded in 2016 by former Freshfields partners and ranked by Chambers and Legal 500 for foreign-trade law. Its message to founders: export control decides whether you can ship, raise and win contracts. A demo abroad, a cloud upload or a blueprint shared with a foreign engineer is already an export. "Goods" includes software and technology. Listed items need prior authorisation regardless of what the exporter knew, and non-compliance brings criminal liability for the company and personally for managers, reputational damage and exclusion from public contracts.

The firm walked through the three regimes, the EU Dual-Use Regulation 2021/821, Germany's Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance, and the War Weapons Control Act, and the licence types that sit on top: individual licences via ELAN-K2, global licences requiring an Internal Compliance Programme, and general authorisations. The practical takeaway for startups was EU General Export Authorisation No. 004 and German AGG No. 24, which cover temporary export of certain listed goods such as UAVs, but not the underlying technology, to the EU and listed countries including Ukraine, for exhibitions and demonstrations, for up to 120 days or 24 months. BLOMSTEIN has advised Helsing on investment-control aspects of its Series A and B rounds.

The capital story, and its skew

Elizabeth Press, founder of Berlin-based D3M Labs and Innovatrice Consulting, brought a transatlantic perspective, German citizen, New York roots, more than €70 million raised over twenty years. The headline numbers are strong: EU member states spent €343 billion on defence in 2024, European defence, security and resilience startups raised a record $8.7 billion in 2025, and defence now accounts for 43 percent of European deep-tech funding and 13 percent of all European venture capital.

Her sharper point was that those totals are skewed by a handful of scale-ups. Late-stage rounds tripled year on year to €4.7 billion while early-stage activity softened. Early-stage investors have become more selective, and founders need product-market validation and a path to scale earlier than they once did. Non-dilutive bridges, the NATO Innovation Fund, KfW's new equity vehicle, HTGF, EUDIS, EDF, DIANA, ESA BIC, matter more, not less.

Her advice on selling was equally direct: customers don't buy the best demo. They buy reliability, production capacity, integration, support and trust, and a slightly inferior product that can be manufactured, deployed and supported at scale often wins. Contact: Elizabeth.Press@D3MLabs.de.

Counter-UAS, from two directions

Two counter-drone companies bracketed the afternoon, approaching the problem from opposite ends.

KUHAKEN Systems, from Tallinn, demonstrated THEIA, a pure-software system that turns two synchronised commercial cameras into a 3D measurement instrument for lower airspace. It outputs position, distance and velocity for every airborne object, every frame, with no radar, RF, laser or neural network, just geometry. Its proprietary method allows long, non-aligned camera baselines, so a single pair can cover kilometres, and the company says centimetre-class accuracy was validated outdoors against an RTK-positioned drone at a third-party research institution and signed off by an independent photogrammetry academic. It is licensed annually per camera pair to camera manufacturers and integrators. Contact: contact@kuhaken.com.

Rattlesnake, a Polish team with a well-prepared pitch, tackles the last fifty metres. FPV drones cross that distance in under a second; human reaction averages 1.5 seconds; jamming fails against fibre-optic guidance and swarms. Rattlesnake's answer is a fully autonomous kinetic system: a GPU camera with edge processing, proprietary ML trajectory prediction, a turret slewing at 1,000 degrees per second and a pneumatic interceptor firing compressed-air rounds at 3,000 per minute, for under €1 per engagement. It sits at TRL 5 with drones shot down in live-fire tests, eight letters of intent with Ukrainian and Polish military and logistics partners, and wins at the EUDIS Hackathon Poland and the European Defence Hackathon. Pickup- and ISO-container-integrated versions exist; a laser-blinding module is planned.

The team is notable for its space heritage: CEO Mateusz Dyrda founded the Robotic Association SKALP and led the EU Digital Innovation Hub dih4.eu; CTO Dominik Marszk spent nine years at ESA on ground infrastructure and the Space Safety Programme; COO Przemysław Rudziński worked on ESA's ARIEL, Comet Interceptor, ROSE-L and FORUM missions. They are raising a €1 million seed at a €9 million pre-money valuation, and, unusually for this stage, showed the scorecard model behind the number.

Drones in ground effect

Not an aerospace company in the classic sense, but arguably the most original hardware on site: Tandairium GmbH of Kiel builds wing-in-ground-effect drones. Founder and CEO/CTO Reiner Jörg is the son of Günther Jörg, who solved the stability problem that plagued Soviet-era ekranoplans by putting two wings in tandem. Tandairium's TW Drone series (TW 4, 8, 11, 14) flies 20-40 centimetres above the water, where ground effect more than doubles aerodynamic efficiency. The company claims up to 90 percent of empty weight as usable payload, 40-1,000 kg capacity, 105-200 km/h and ranges from 60 km to 1,000 km, transitioning to watercraft mode when waves exceed 0.4-1.34 metres.

The TW 4 prototype has flown with 37 kg over 60 km on an 8 kW electric drive. The TW 14 defence variant on the banner promises low radar, sonar, noise and thermal signatures for reconnaissance, coastal surveillance, logistics and strike. A manned TWS Seats series (2-23 seats, Type A WIG, boat licence only) targets coastal transport and offshore crew transfer. Tandairium is positioning itself as Europe's answer to DARPA's Liberty Lifter and China's ground-effect programmes, and is seeking investors to scale production. Contact: r.joerg@tandairium.com.

What it means for Swiss aerospace

Three takeaways. First, the support layer around European defence startups, studios, trade lawyers, fundraising advisers, embedded-software houses with cheque books, is maturing fast, and Swiss founders should use it rather than rebuild it. Second, export control is not a back-office topic: for a non-EU company, the distinction between transfer and export, and the temporary-export authorisations for demonstrations, shape what can be shown and where. Third, counter-UAS is where the energy is, but the differentiation is splitting into passive measurement on one side and autonomous close-range effectors on the other, and the most interesting platforms, like ground-effect drones, sit between traditional aerospace and maritime categories.

Day three moves to the runway for flight testing and live demonstrations. We will report back.

Swiss Aerospace Ventures attended the European Defense Tech Festival as an observer. Company descriptions are based on public presentations, exhibition materials and company websites.