Kelluu flies its airships where Russian GPS jammers run hot. That is not a design aspiration. It is the job.
The Finnish company's hydrogen-powered autonomous airships have spent years operating inside what NATO calls contested electromagnetic environments — the kind of airspace where enemy forces deliberately scramble satellite navigation signals. Most commercial drone makers treat GPS denial as a scenario you plan for in a white paper. Kelluu's fleet has logged more than 50,000 kilometers of actual flight in it, according to the company's announcement.
On Tuesday, the NATO Innovation Fund announced its first investment in a Finnish company, leading a €15 million Series A into Kelluu. The fund, established by allied governments to bet on dual-use technology that serves both defense and commercial markets, is making a bet that signals where NATO member states think surveillance infrastructure is heading.
Kelluu was founded in 2018 in Joensuu, a town in eastern Finland roughly 50 miles from the Russian border, according to Tech Funding News. The founders — Janne Hietala, Jiri Jormakka, and Jouni Lintu — built the company around a simple observation: the satellites and drones that governments rely on for persistent aerial surveillance each have a fundamental flaw. Satellites pass overhead on fixed orbits, leaving gaps. Drones can loiter but drain batteries fast and struggle in harsh cold. An airship — lighter than air, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, able to carry a 5-kilogram sensor package for more than 12 hours — sits in between.
Each Kelluu airship is 12 meters long, roughly the length of a delivery truck. Hydrogen provides both lift and electrical power, which means no heavy battery pack dragging down endurance. The fuel cell runs clean and cold, without the infrared signature of a combustion engine. At minus 33 degrees Celsius — the temperature that freezes standard lithium batteries and grounds most drones — Kelluu's platform keeps working.
The operational record is what caught NATO's attention. During Exercise Steadfast Dart 26, a 10,000-troop, 13-nation NATO drill in Germany, Kelluu completed a real-time integration with the Maven Smart System, the U.S. military's platform for processing intelligence from drones and other unmanned systems. The company has run five live NATO missions and exercises with air forces from the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Finland. Five Kelluu airships operating from a single base can cover 30,000 square kilometers — an area larger than Belgium — with continuous sensor coverage.
Kelluu is also one of 15 companies selected from more than 2,600 applicants into NATO's DIANA programme, the alliance's accelerator for deep tech with defense applications. That is the credential pipeline that matters: companies that make it through DIANA tend to get fast-tracked into NATO procurement conversations.
The dual-use angle is not spin. Kelluu monitors tailings ponds and pit walls for Terrafame, Finland's nickel and zinc miner, over a 60 square kilometer area. The same sensors that track Russian troop movements can watch for dam failures at a mining site. The platform does not care about the mission.
This is the infrastructure bet NATO's innovation arm is making: that the next generation of persistent aerial intelligence will not come from a satellite megaconstellation or a fleet of quadcopters, but from a hybrid that combines the endurance of one with the flexibility of the other. The price tag — €15 million — is small by defense standards. It is also exactly the kind of early bet that gets multiplied several times over if the concept survives contact with actual combat zones.
The harder question is whether airships can survive in a high-intensity conflict, not just an exercise. GPS denial is one threat. Anti-air systems are another. The 12-hour endurance that looks long compared to a drone looks short compared to a satellite orbit. An airship loitering over a target for half a day is an airship that can be targeted for half a day.
Kelluu's answer is that they have been doing this long enough, in enough difficult conditions, that the platform's limits are better understood than the limits of competitors who are still writing white papers. Whether that operational record translates into a procurement contract is the question. The NATO Innovation Fund just decided it is worth €15 million to find out.
