Monopulse raises over €2M for jam-resistant NATO drones

Danish-Lithuanian drone maker Monopulse has raised over €2 million led by Lithuania’s state-backed Coinvest Capital, joined by Plug and Play Ventures and 68 business angels, to expand production of its jam-resistant surveillance drones and push into Germany, France and the Netherlands.

The round, announced on Monday 12 October, is small by this autumn’s defence-tech standards – and that is exactly what makes it worth reading closely.

Sixty-eight angels and one state fund

Coinvest Capital, Lithuania’s state-backed co-investment fund, led the round. Plug and Play Ventures joined, alongside business angels from the Lithuanian Business Angel Network and a syndicate assembled through NGL Ventures – 68 individual angels putting in €560,000 together, the largest single syndicate the network has built to date.

The company says the capital will go into expanding production capacity, strengthening R&D and accelerating its entry into Germany, France and the Netherlands. It is the first equity round on record for a company that until now ran on revenue and a €1.12 million loan from ILTE, Lithuania’s national development bank, secured in November 2025 to expand UAV production.

None of the backers put a stage label on the round. At just over €2 million it sits in seed territory, but nobody involved is calling it that, so neither will we.

A Falcon that assumes the GPS is gone

Founded in 2021 by Justas Poderys and Alexander Vesterhauge, Monopulse straddles two countries by design: MNP Technologijos handles development, prototyping and assembly in Kaunas, while a Danish entity carries mechanical engineering and testing. Its main product, the Falcon MK3S, is a small reconnaissance drone that carries cameras, not munitions – daylight and thermal optics, encrypted radio links built to keep the operator in control when GPS is jammed, and imagery stored on the aircraft rather than in a cloud.

The design choices read like a checklist of what three years of electronic warfare on NATO’s eastern flank have taught. The Lithuanian and Danish armed forces already fly its systems. The supply chain deliberately avoids Chinese components – camera sensors come from Sony in Japan, motors from Taiwan – and the company says it does not sell directly to the Ukrainian military. A hybrid platform called HydroHex, operating in both air and water, is in development. Nor is this a lab project waiting for its market: the company reports close to €3 million in revenue for 2025 and says it aims to roughly double that in 2026.

Drones are where European defence money goes

The market Monopulse sells into is large and compounding. The global military drone market stood at $47.4 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow at an 8.9% CAGR through 2033, with Europe accounting for over 23% of it (Grand View Research, 2026). The capital side is moving even faster: European defence tech has raised a record $7.4 billion in venture funding in 2026 so far, nearly three times the $2.6 billion of all of 2025, and drone startups alone account for $4.7 billion of it across just 40 rounds (State of Defence Tech 2026, Dealroom and Resilience Media, October 2026).

Against our own records, the spread is striking. Portugal’s Tekever closed a €498 million Series D for its military drones in September 2026, the top of the European band, and Kyiv’s Buntar Aerospace raised $16 million for autonomous recon drones earlier this month. A €2 million round sits at the opposite end of the same shelf – and that end is where the next Tekevers get assembled.

The Baltics are financing their own deterrence

So what does a €2 million cheque signal in a $7.4 billion year? That the Baltic defence ecosystem has built a funding ladder that starts at home. The reality is that mega-rounds dominate the headline numbers: 40 drone rounds worth $4.7 billion means a handful of giants set the average (Dealroom and Resilience Media, October 2026). The good news is what is happening underneath – a state co-investment fund, a national development bank and 68 individual angels just financed a drone manufacturer between them. Lithuania is not waiting for Brussels, or for Silicon Valley, to decide its drones are investable.

Two things are worth watching from here: whether the German, French and Dutch entries convert into procurement rather than pilots, and whether the angel syndicate model travels – 68 private individuals backing a defence manufacturer remains a rare sight in most of Europe. The nearest proof point is a stand, not a slide: Monopulse shows the Falcon at SKYDD, the National Defence Expo in Stockholm, on 20-22 October.

We track every European round like this one, daily, in our fundraising data. The Baltics are building deterrence with local capital. Keep watching them.