TechCrunch has an interesting article about an engineer who is challenging the Defense Behemoths.
In the summer of 2021, Dimitrious Kottas made a move that would be unfathomable to most Silicon Valley engineers: after leaving his coveted position at Apple's Special Projects Group, he packed up his life in California and moved back to Athens to start a defense company.
Three and a half years later, his startup, Delian Alliance Industries, has set up solar-powered surveillance towers that monitor some of Greece's borders around the clock and detect wildfires on remote islands, along with a pipeline of other products, including concealed sea drones designed to keep enemies at bay.
But Kottas' most ambitious bet isn't on any particular technology — it's really that a small Greek startup can break through Europe's notoriously splintered defense market.
After earning recognition for his academic work at the University of Minnesota on GPS-denied navigation – research that he says has been cited over 1,400 times – he joined Apple in 2016, where he spent six years working on autonomous systems featuring cameras, lidars, and radars.
"At the heart of autonomy is perception," Kottas explained, describing how machines must understand not just where objects are but what they're doing and what they intend to do. "This lies at the heart of autonomy, and given autonomy is going to be at the heart of all future weapon systems, that's the core technology that's going to drive change in the defense industry over the next decade."
Rather than attempting to build the next-generation fighter jet, Kottas began with something pragmatic that he could sell more immediately: surveillance towers. The move was seemingly ripped from the playbook of eight-year-old weapons maker Anduril, which started off with software-augmented surveillance towers that it sold to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The most striking example is a two-meter suicide vessel that comes packed in a cylinder and is deployable months in advance on the seabed at depths where satellites and drones can't detect it. When remotely activated, it appears "out of nowhere to the enemy," Kottas told TechCrunch, adding that Delian has patented this approach, which uses commercial materials to manufacture the weapons at "large scale and really at extremely low cost."
Here's where Kottas' story gets more complicated. Despite Delian's technological achievements and operational success in Greece, the broader European market remains a formidable challenge. U.S. officials have reportedly been pressuring European countries to continue buying weapons from U.S. outfits. Further, European countries have long favored their homegrown defense companies
Naturally, the question is what Kottas thinks of Anduril, and the founder is respectful, though not intimidated. "It's definitely a generational company that is going to inspire many founders and military officers all across the planet," he said.
But he cautioned against assuming early winners. "Where we stand right now, it's like 2015 for self-driving cars [...] Imagine trying to predict the winner back then."
Still, the question remains whether a Greek startup — no matter how innovative — can convince French, German or British defense establishments to bet their national security on foreign technology. Kottas recently submitted a bid for a German tender, a test case for his thesis that a decentralized Europe can be overcome through superior technology and competitive pricing.
Either way, Kottas' unconventional journey from Athens to Minneapolis to Apple and back to Athens suggests he's comfortable with long odds.
There's a "benefit of building a company" in a smaller market on a continent known for its balkanization. "It forces you to be more resilient, more efficient, and to focus ruthlessly on building great technology at a really low price point, which matters in this business."
In the past we have seen start-ups defying and winning against established behemoths, is this even possible in the lucrative defense market?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 01 2025, @03:25PM (3 children)
It's not surprising at all that some guy that worked in Apple's "Skunk Works" would then start a "defense" company to support a fascist state.
(Score: 0, Troll) by ikanreed on Friday August 01 2025, @03:36PM (1 child)
There's gotta be a secret sauce to making your dumb dime-a-dozen startup "news-worthy" like this.
It's not like "What if we used cameras to monitor borders" is new, hell the Berlin Wall did it in 1975, to much complaint. You might get some particularly dim investors to bite by slapping "AI" onto that premise, but I don't understand how these news articles are generated so effectively.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday August 01 2025, @04:38PM
The selling point isn't "AI watchtower", it's "commercial off-the shelf priced autonomous warfare". Think about how few killer-bots you need to suppress an entire country. Not many drones are needed to shoot truck and rail drivers at important intersections and double-tap the rescue teams. Occasional random shootings of people, maybe dropping some fragmentation grenades on the supermarket looting hordes will help with the chaos. It's like landmines (which a strong movement wanted to ban), just everywhere.
When someone gets that - and even more so, the countermeasures (because these will be bought by legit countries with "how much can you pay?" taxpayer money) - to work, it's going to be the "next big thing". And that's not going to be one of the slow entrenched players with boardroom design by committee, but some fast moving startup.
Looking at it that way, gambling a little may not look so bad for some VC without morals. These like to make money, hell be damned, rather than standing in the rain with a transparent "BAN LANDMINES AND AUTONOMOUS WARFARE!".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday August 01 2025, @05:52PM
Greece is a fascist state now? Today? I know they had a military dictatorship but that ended over 50 years ago. Is it fascism that he created a camera product that could monitor borders, property or look for wildfires? The definition for fascism sure is changing these days ...
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 01 2025, @09:49PM
Universities are churning out kids capable of designing and building the tech at a rate of thousands per year (where the defense industry probably needs less than 10% of those graduates for design work...)
Practical building of the devices, economically and with robust reliability takes a bit more experience, but it's not an insurmountable problem, a few people with experience in a company willing to listen to them can get to good performance levels on reliability and cost.
The insurmountable trick for most is: funding. Who's going to pay you to make the cool toys? Which established defense contractors are going to roll over and allow you to eat their lunch? How many legislators do you own? However many that is, odds are the established contractors own all of yours better than you do plus a lot more you have no sway with whatsoever.
15 years ago, I sketched up designs for "border patrol" consisting of cheap towers with solar panels for drones to land on and "refuel" during surveillance missions. The drones would fly recirculating patterns back and forth along hundreds of miles of border, with the towers acting as both recharge stations and data relay towers. Of course you'd tap standard utilities where they're available, but putting up one of these towers every 10 miles would be a hell of a lot faster and cheaper to both build and maintain than building out cable based infrastructure. 200 towers and the US-Mexico border is covered with IR "eyes" all through the night, and motion sensing intel during the days. We had a company more than capable of designing and building both the hardware and software to make such a system reality, what we lacked was the sales traction. Best we could get on a regular basis was "surveillance as a service" to the local SWAT teams.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jman on Saturday August 02 2025, @11:55AM
After all this time, it wouldn't be a completely awful thing for the Greeks to reign supreme again, or at least their sometimes awesome ideas. Perhaps in their new-found safety, they'll have time to give us Democracy 2.0
The story was a good challenge for our silicon-based brethren, as well. Reading along, parsing "The move was seemingly ripped from the playbook of eight-year-old weapons maker Anduril", at first I wondered, who is this Anduril kid, and how did an 8-year-old get a government defense contract?
Grammar is like any code. Complex states emerging from relatively simple rules. Even we humans who invented the program are occasionally fooled by the result, at least for a moment.