Kelluu, a Finnish deeptech company operating the world’s largest autonomous airship fleet, has raised €15 million in Series A funding. The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking its first investment in a Finnish company. Additional participation came from Keen Venture Partners, GungnirCapital, and Tesi.

The funding follows Kelluu’s successful completion of two phases of NATO’s DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) programme. Kelluu designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous hydrogen-powered airships that provide persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The company’s unmanned fleet delivers continuous monitoring and high-resolution data collection across vast and remote areas, enabling earlier threat detection and more efficient operations.

The airships are designed for silent, low-emission operation in challenging environments. By combining long-endurance persistence with high-precision sensing, Kelluu’s technology addresses a critical gap between satellites and drones. While satellites offer broad coverage and drones provide detailed imagery, both face operational limitations related to endurance, weather resilience, and regulatory constraints.

Kelluu’s platform enables missions exceeding 12 hours and supports multiple sensing modalities, delivering real-time, ultra-high-quality imagery. Five airships operating from a single base can cover up to 30,000 square kilometres. We built Kelluu at the edge of Europe, in one of the hardest operating environments outside conflict zones, because we believe that persistent aerial intelligence would become critical infrastructure - not just for defence, but for the resilience of entire countries, said Janne Hietala, CEO of Kelluu.

Founded as a dual-use company, Kelluu’s technology also supports civilian applications, including forestry monitoring, meteorology, smart-city sensing, and the protection of critical infrastructure. These capabilities enable the creation of high-resolution digital twins and provide cost advantages compared with traditional manned aviation. The new funding will be used to further optimise Kelluu’s technology, scale operations, and expand deployment of its autonomous airship fleet.

The company is also advancing its long-term vision through Kelluu AI Labs, which aims to develop geospatial foundation models for the physical environment, supporting applications in defence, infrastructure resilience, and environmental monitoring. With increasing investment in European defence capabilities and a growing need for persistent aerial intelligence, Kelluu is well-positioned to contribute to strengthening security and resilience across both military and civilian domains.