We sat down with Dimitrios Kottas, a former Apple engineer and the Co-Founder and CEO of Delian Alliance Industries, to discuss how they’re building the architecture for tomorrow’s battlefields.
The company builds autonomous Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems that connect “any sensor to any effector” to detect and neutralize threats across land, sea, and air—spanning surveillance towers, electronic-warfare modules, navigation, command-and-control, and one-way INTERCEPTIGON aerial and surface drones for coastal defense.
We discussed why he made the leap to defense tech before it was fashionable, what he has learned about building and fundraising in defense, and his advice for the next wave of European founders.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What Motivated You To Leave Apple and Found a Defense Company in Europe, at a Time When It Wasn’t Fashionable?
I founded the company in late 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Back then, starting a defense company in Europe felt contrarian—honestly, it was contrarian even in the U.S.
The seed was planted years earlier, when, as a graduate student in the U.S., I worked on similar technologies with two very different partners: first, a major defense prime with the U.S. Air Force sponsoring the work, and later a Silicon Valley company. The contrast was stark. Development cycles in defense were slower and more fragmented compared to those of modern tech companies. That stayed with me.
Around 2020–2021, several events in Eastern Europe made it personal. The Armenia–Azerbaijan war showed how new technologies—especially drones—can overwhelm legacy forces. There was also a standoff in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey. I’m from a Greek island, my brother was doing his military service at the time, and suddenly, the “technology gap” was no longer just a theoretical concern.
I believed Europe would soon confront the same challenges the U.S. was already grappling with—military inefficiency and a lack of readiness for emerging battlefield technologies—likely to an even greater degree. And this wasn’t just my concern; it was a problem that affected every EU and NATO member.
A2/AD (Anti-Access/Area Denial): refers to a military strategy and set of technologies aimed at preventing an adversary from entering a specific region (anti-access) and limiting their ability to operate effectively within it (area denial). This typically involves an integrated system of sensors, command-and-control, and effectors (such as missiles, drones, or electronic warfare tools) designed to detect, track, and neutralize incoming threats across land, sea, air, or space.
Your Company Is Known for Maritime and Coastal Defense—Why That Focus?
Coastal defense is one of our core use cases. Greece has countless islands and long coastlines, so the mission is obvious to me—but that geography is increasingly relevant globally.
You see similar challenges in parts of Southeast Asia and Northern Europe: many small islands, remote sites, and critical waterways that must be surveilled and defended.
What Were Your Pivotal “Moments of Truth” Since Founding?
The first was the realization that software alone wouldn’t cut it. Coming from tech, you’re tempted to imagine a pure-software business; in defense, customers buy outcomes, not code. To deliver those outcomes, you have to fuse software, hardware, and operations into a single, tightly run system. If you try to sell software in isolation, you end up as a small component provider with limited leverage and impact.
The second turning point came when we built a proper sales organization and began validating use cases beyond Greece. As we engaged with other allied nations, we saw how similar their needs were—and how transferable our solution could be. We realized that our market was much larger than just Greece.
Fundraising in Defense Can Be Challenging. What Do Investors Have to Understand?
First: Procurement timelines. In the West, processes are optimized for transparency, not speed. The default time between budget allocation and money hitting a project is 5 years in the European Union—often incompatible with classic VC expectations.
Second: Change is coming, but it will take time. There’s a broad consensus across NATO and the EU to compress timelines—such as NATO’s Rapid Adoption Action Plan objective to compress the procurement process to less than two years—and multiple initiatives pointing in that direction. But these reforms are just beginning. A lot of work remains to educate both policymakers and investors on how procurement works today and how it needs to work if we want to keep pace with our adversaries.
You recently raised a sizable Series A ($14mn). What’s Next?
International expansion. We chose to master one market first—deliver end-to-end, go through the full cycle with real users, and prove it at scale. With two large customers now, the next step is expanding to additional NATO countries. That takes capital for demo units, test and pilot installations, and the operational backbone to support them.
You Have a Broader Product Portfolio Than Many Early Defense Hardware Startups. Why?
In my view, it’s very hard to survive in defense with a single product—unless you’re an outlier or a pure contractor doing one-off custom work. For us, it’s not about the number of products; it’s about the number of customers we serve deeply.
Right now, we have two customers, and we deliver large-scale solutions to them. Our primary offering is a surveillance network that detects vessels, drones, and wildfires. That solution requires many hardware components—a mosaic of different sensors—integrated and driven by one core software stack. We stay ruthlessly focused on delivering a few solutions for a few customers and doing them well.
We also have products in our R&D pipeline that extend these networks. The goal is to evolve from surveillance networks to area-denial networks, which means integrating non-conventional effectors—for example, one-way surface or aerial vehicles and soft-kill systems—into the same architecture. But the philosophy doesn’t change: we build end-to-end solutions.
Effectors: In defense systems, an effector is the component that acts on the target after detection and decision—the “shooter” in the kill chain—covering both kinetic options (missiles, guns, interceptors, loitering munitions, one-way USVs/UAVs) and non-kinetic options (jammers/EW pods, decoys, dazzlers, high-energy lasers, high-power microwaves).
Competing for Top Engineers Is Tough. How Do You Win Talent?
Senior people are motivated by mission and consequence. If we don’t boost European defense capabilities now, the alternatives could be much worse. Many accomplished engineers already have financial security; they care about protecting their families, communities, and way of life—and they want their work to matter.
For new graduates, we look for ambition without intimidation: people who believe they can compete globally—against big-tech labs or heavily funded U.S. and Chinese teams—no matter where they grew up. Europe has immense raw talent, but fewer companies that produce seasoned practitioners. We want builders who strive to make a European company the best in the world at what it does.
What’s Your Advice for Founders Entering Defense Tech?
Be bolder. And work as much as possible with the end users. Too often, founders ship 30 features when operators would be thrilled with the two that solve real pain today. Spend time with users and your job gets simpler—your roadmap will, too.
As for focus areas, don’t prepare for the previous war. Prepare for the next one.