Building a situational picture isn’t just about collecting more data — it’s about whether the pieces can be put together.

Text, audio, image, and video arrive through separate channels, and with only one of them, you know almost nothing.

ORCRIST Technologies, founded in Berlin in 2023 and now over 150 people strong and wholly founder-owned, builds AI software for data fusion and analysis for the German Armed Forces, security authorities, and operators of critical infrastructure.

In July 2026, it acquired Lancelot Systems, the intelligence tech startup behind Avalon, Europe’s largest database of combat video footage — and the fastest-growing startup to come out of the European Defense Tech Hackathons. The two companies are pooling their analysis engines into a single vendor-neutral stack, developed entirely in Germany and built to close a national capability gap without foreign dependencies.

Learn more about the deal, the data problem behind it, and why a 25-year-old founder turned down VCs for a merger, from our interview with Yorck Hesselbarth, CDO at ORCRIST, and Merlin Hipp, founder of Lancelot Systems.

Who Are You and What Are You Up To?

Yorck Hesselbarth: I’m the Chief Development Officer (CDO) of Orcrist. Before that, I was amongst others, responsible for AI at the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub. I’ve always been very interested in data— that’s why I did a PhD— and I spend most of my time after answering one question: how do we bring the armed forces where they belong, in the middle of society and at the forefront of innovation?

Orcrist Technologies is a Berlin-based defense technology company building AI-powered software for real-time situational awareness and sensor fusion. Spurred by the war in Ukraine, we build with a clear European compass: digitally sovereign technology to provide German and European defense and security policy with precisely the technological tools it needs for the 21st century. 

Merlin Hipp: I’m the founder of Lancelot Systems, and I got into defense by accident. One and a half years ago, I was a student in Berlin when I went to the Darkstar hackathon in Estonia in January 2025 — thinking that helping Ukraine would be a good idea and wanting to see where I could be useful. There were so many people building cool stuff: subsea drones to surveil cables, aerial drones, drone interceptors. I got infected by defense tech.

In the months that followed, we started Lancelot Systems, specializing in data analysis for the intelligence domain, and built Avalon, Europe’s largest database of combat video footage scraped from Russian sources.

Only along the way did we realize how big the data problem really is. AI requires enormous amounts of data, in defense as everywhere else — and nobody has it. A lot of scale-ups capture data just for themselves; we started solving the problem for the whole industry. And as more companies, including bigger ones, signed contracts and got access to Avalon, we grew very quickly as a company. (Editor’s note: Lancelot has been our fastest-growing EDTH alumni startup.)

We’ve also been to a number of European Defense Tech Hackathons: Hamburg in October 2025, which helped us get started, and Berlin in November 2025. And it was in the aftermath of that Berlin hackathon, co-organized by EDTH and the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub (CIHBw), that the CIHBw connected us to Orcrist. Then in 2026 we came back to the hackathons in the Netherlands in April and in Prague in May, this time as mentors — giving back to the community and helping several EDTH alumni startups access data. 

Yorck: I first came across EDTH in late 2024, when I was looking into European defense tech and what was going on beyond Germany. That’s when I signed up as a mentor for the EDTH hackathon in Munich in February 2025 — right around the time Lancelot Systems started. I was glad to see an ecosystem forming that gathers people and connects them. So Orcrist and Lancelot were already part of the same ecosystem long before we met each other.

Why Did You Decide to Join Forces as Companies?

Yorck: Because at some point you have to commit. Having data and wanting data is one thing; you can settle that with an invoice. But we had a much bigger thing in mind: mission alignment. We wanted to be able to say that we’re working with people whose hearts are in the right place.

The question we’re both trying to answer is: how do we achieve digital independence? Something like a new Five Eyes community is taking shape, and we have to define our own role in it — our role as civilians. We follow political developments closely and translate them into technology that helps maintain stability.

In the intelligence domain, Europe is still very dependent on the Americans — but the hybrid war is happening here, in Europe. We’re trying to close that gap: to give Europe a sovereign capability, so that not everything has to run through American platforms. Being able to push back matters for the country. We don’t want to have to ask Alex Karp for permission.

That’s a European perspective, but it isn’t an anti-American one. It’s about Europe not being just a market where others sell their stuff, but a capable actor. It’s about doing things on a common basis of values: an open Europe that acts as a partner, with values of its own.

Merlin: Technically, the merger brings together capabilities that belong together. Orcrist does text and audio; Lancelot does visual analysis. Once you intersect all of it, you get a genuinely complete situational picture. That’s the mosaic Europe has to solve.

And one more point: the ontology layer. That’s what the debate around Palantir is really about. For us it’s about owning the whole stack — and owning it with the same set of values. That’s how you build trust in this domain.

Why Sell Instead of Continuing to Build on Your Own?

Merlin: Because this is a real merger, not an exit — and because you can’t buy your way to what we’re building. The technical reason is multimodal fusion, and fusion needs a common architecture. You can’t just collect or buy the data. An architecture has to be developed jointly: how you define quality, how you handle user feedback. If you work with loose interfaces and bad feedback loops, you end up with nothing. So you have to integrate vertically.

That’s also why the whole team is coming over and staying. All shares go to Orcrist, so it’s a full transition, not a partial one. Our analysis engines, Avalon and Gral, get integrated into the Orcrist Intelligence Platform in the background, while the Lancelot brand stays in place as the product and capability designation for existing customer relationships.

So fundamentally, it’s a capability expansion — a horizontal one: Lancelot delivers the visual layer. And intelligence is more than the sum of its parts: with only one data source, you know almost nothing. With genuinely good data fusion across several sources, the insights start to look superhuman. That’s the capability Europe needs.

Yorck: We’re not disclosing the sum, but we agreed pretty quickly — there wasn’t a long back-and-forth negotiation. The conversation was less about terms and more about where we want to go together. There aren’t many intelligence tech companies in Europe, and those based in Germany are even rarer, so it’s going to be a very exciting time. We can move forward as a unit and keep going at the same speed.

Why Orcrist, and Not One of the Other Offers?

Merlin: We had VC inquiries at Lancelot before, but we never let any VCs in. There were other bidders as well — the defense market is highly lucrative for investors right now simply because the need is so obvious. Defense has become a normal industry; intelligence is going to get there.

With Orcrist, we’re going to have the best time. I’m 25 — I’m negotiating my twenties here, deciding where I want to spend the next years. This way we can continue the work, finish it, and take it to a completely new level.

Yorck: Achieving important stuff with great people beats nice-to-have stuff with merely good people. And there’s a sense of urgency. You read it in the newspaper: it’s getting closer to home. In Germany, intelligence has been a back-row discipline, even though we’re actually good at it. We want to break out of that — there are good alternatives.

There’s no shortage of capital; even the banks are liberalizing. What it needs, on top of capital, is incentive alignment, experience, and a combination of different skills: the willingness to just do things, stumble, catch yourself, and then move forward more steadily.

This is also where classic VC logic doesn’t quite apply. We don’t see this only as an opportunity but also as a duty — it’s about more than a revenue goal.

What’s Specific About the German Intelligence Environment?

Yorck: There’s a double requirement: you have to be interoperable within the alliance while retaining maximum national control. Your architecture has to be able to hold that tension, but the tension itself gets resolved politically, not technically.

And you don’t wait for the requirement holders to tell you what they want. You build what you think might fit, with feedback from Ukraine. For this field, there’s never been a more urgent time to build products than now. Orcrist is growing extremely fast, and we’re still hiring.

What Would You Tell Founders Starting Out Today?

Merlin: Look for smart capital — people you actually want to work with, who’ll go through the ups and downs with you. There’s no how-to-get-rich-fast hack. The people matter far more than anything else because, in the end, you always do business with people.