Gallium Defense raises €7.1M seed for a cheaper drone-detection radar
Paris-based Gallium Defense raised a €7.1M seed led by Keen Venture Partners and 360 Capital to build GDS-10, a low-cost radar aimed at detecting drones up to 10 km away.
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Founded 2026 · Paris, France
Paris-based Gallium Defense has raised a €7.1M seed round led by Keen Venture Partners and 360 Capital, with Omnes Capital and Polytechnique Ventures participating, to build a low-cost radar that aims to detect drones up to 10 km away.
Four investors and a stealth exit on 2 November
The round was announced on 2 November 2026, as the company came out of stealth (Tech.eu). Keen Venture Partners, a Dutch fund, and Paris-based 360 Capital co-lead. Omnes Capital and Polytechnique Ventures complete the cap table.
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The money goes to industrialization and production capacity, the supply chain and commercial operations, plus more prototyping, AI development and demonstrations for operators in Europe and allied NATO countries. Keen general partner Alexander Ribbink said Gallium Defense “has the team, the industrial partners and the cost model to make drone detection a standard layer”. 360 Capital partner Alexandre Mordacq said drones “have turned air security and air defence into a need for thousands of sites”.
Three ex-BCG colleagues and a radar called GDS-10
Gallium Defense was founded in April 2026 in Paris by three former Boston Consulting Group colleagues. Eric Fournier is CEO, Florian Lemoine is CTO after stints at the French defense procurement agency DGA and at NATO, and Robin Mandel is COO after Safran and Thales. The team counts about 15 people and plans to reach roughly 50. You can find the company on its Sesamers startup profile.
The product is the GDS-10, a software-defined X-band AESA radar with an antenna of about 512 elements. It targets FPV drones at up to 10 km, with 360-degree horizontal and 90-degree vertical coverage, swarm tracking and resistance to jamming. Two prototype antennas have detected class 1 drones at 10 km, in controlled conditions with good weather and known drone positions. “We would have preferred rain,” Fournier said.
The cost thesis sits in the antenna. “Each time you’re saving a bit of money on one antenna, it’s multiplied by 510 times,” Fournier told Tech.eu. The company claims a tenfold cut in antenna cost, and that claim is the company’s own. There is no revenue yet. Commercial orders open in the first quarter of 2027, and Tech Funding News reports six prospects in discussion and a target of about €6M in orders in 2027 if they land.
A counter-drone market that triples by 2031
MarketsandMarkets sizes the global counter-drone market at $9.17bn in 2026 and $29.70bn in 2031, as cited by Tech Funding News. Those two figures imply growth of about 26% a year, our own calculation. Gallium Defense is aiming at the gap between cheap radars with a range under 5 km and the multi-million-euro systems of Raytheon, Thales, Hensoldt and Saab.
The neighbors give the €7.1M some scale. Our own records show Hypersonica raising €100M in a Series B on the same day, and Quint Computing raising €9.1M for quantum error correction on 3 November. Among radar rivals, Tech Funding News lists Robin Radar of the Netherlands, with a 100-radar IRIS contract for the Dutch defense ministry in December 2025, and Chaos Industries in the US, with $510M raised in November 2025. Alta Ares in France raised €50M in June 2026.
What a seed buys in a crowded radar race
Radar has never been a mass-market sport, and a seed of this size will not change that on its own. We are seeing a pattern across European defense startups, though. Investors are backing a cost curve before they back a contract, and a founding team that has sat on the buyer side of NATO procurement has a head start on the sales cycle.
The good news is that demand is spreading beyond armies. Airports, ports, data centers and energy sites all want drone detection, and each of them buys on price. Fournier describes the field question as how to meet 80% of the need at 20% of the price, and that is the question a cheap antenna array answers.
Imagine if detection became a standard layer on every critical site in Europe. That is the bet. Watch the first outdoor demos in all weather, the first signed order in 2027, and how many of the discussions turn into contracts. Follow every round of this kind in our fundraising data. Let’s build the layer!
