How an Apple Veteran is Quietly Rebooting Europe’s Defense Industry
When Dimitrios Kottas left Apple’s secretive Special Projects Group in 2021, he wasn’t looking to iterate on consumer gadgets. He had a different target in mind: Europe’s fragmented and under-innovated defense industry.
Two years later, Kottas is quietly assembling a war machine in Athens. His company, Delian , has just raised a $14 million Series A to scale what he calls “sovereign sensing infrastructure” — autonomous defense systems built from the ground up in Europe, for Europe. The mission? Build a vertically integrated defense company for a new geopolitical era.
While traditional contractors across the continent rely on sprawling supply chains and legacy systems, Delian’s model is unapologetically Silicon Valley. Everything — from custom electronics and sensors to the operating software and drone hardware — is built in-house. This level of vertical integration, rarely seen in European defense, allows for speed, adaptability, and ultimately lower costs.
The company’s flagship products include mobile sea drones, AI-powered surveillance towers, and “Interceptigons” — self-driving naval interceptors designed to disrupt threats before they escalate. While the vision is global, the go-to-market is local: the Greek Army and civil authorities already use Delian’s systems for wildfire prevention and border surveillance.
But this is more than a hardware play. With Delian , Kottas is building a new kind of defense tech company — one that fuses the technical precision of a Big Tech lab with the geopolitical urgency of a sovereign mission. In doing so, he hopes to inspire a new generation of European industrial champions.
And in typical Apple fashion, he’s doing it quietly — until it’s impossible to ignore.
Source:
A.M.
