Orqa: building Europe's non-Chinese drone stack, from FPV goggles to aerial robotics
Key points
Key takeaways from the Orqa interview on Dealroom's Scaling Europe show with co-founder and CEO Srdjan Kovacevic (August 2026):
A sovereign, non-Chinese hardware bet made in 2016. Orqa started in Croatia as a hardware engineering services firm, then built its own products on the conviction that European startups could do hardware locally rather than defaulting to China. The founder frames the early years as "stubbornness" that geopolitics later vindicated.
From a consumer hobby to defence. The first product was FPV goggles for drone hobbyists; demand scaled only when the defence vertical, driven by the war in Ukraine, moved into the space. Orqa now describes itself as a European aerial-robotics company with a full in-house technology stack, hardware and software, designed and made in Europe.
Skating to where NATO is going, not Ukraine's front line. Around 2023 Orqa chose to shape its roadmap around the future needs of Western/NATO end users, more complex and safer-to-operate systems, rather than compete on price and speed against Ukrainian suppliers already serving their own war fighters.
250,000 products shipped in a year, and accelerating. Across its portfolio (components, drones and ground stations), Orqa ended last year at ~250,000 units shipped worldwide; the CEO says it hit that figure by mid-2026 this year, on a trajectory to roughly double to half a million.
A drone every 80 seconds. At full serial production the line can build a drone every 80 seconds, giving capacity of ~280,000 drones a year including the components that go into them; Orqa also supplies dozens of other Western drone makers.
Supply chain is the bottleneck. Materials, especially semiconductors, are the main constraint: after the COVID-era chip shortage during its Kickstarter delivery, the CEO says the AI boom is now driving a fresh semiconductor squeeze with blown-out lead times, forcing Orqa to take risk and stockpile inventory ahead of unpredictable demand.
Warfare's once-in-a-generation shift. Kovacevic argues drones have transformed warfare, likening armoured assaults today to cavalry charging machine guns, and warns most Western armies have not yet transformed; he cites Ukraine recording ~200,000 successful drone strikes and ~35,000 drone-on-drone interceptions in a single month (June).
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