Finland’s Kelluu bets on autonomous airships for new Arctic defense era

When you hear the word airship, you probably picture the giant Hindenburg drifting across the sky. Finnish technology startup Kelluu is offering a different view: small, autonomous, low-cost, surveillance airships that have the potential to fill critical gaps in Arctic defense.

“This is a leap from very large to a small and manageable size that’s also very capable,” says CEO Janne Hietala. While the Hindenburg was the length of about two and a half football fields, Kelluu’s airships are only about 12 meters and can fit inside a standard shipping container.

Reinventing the airship

This small size gives Kelluu a significant cost advantage, enabling mass manufacturing, as well as sizeable environmental gains. “Once airborne, they’re lighter than air,” Hietala says. That means the airships needs very little energy to stay up. And they run on hydrogen fuel cells with close to zero emissions and almost no noise.

“Then instead of looking at just one airship, the question is, what does it enable when we have a thousand?” Hietala says. The answer is a persistent layer of surveillance occupying the space between satellites and conventional drones.

Kelluu doesn’t sell its airships, but the data that they gather as a service. Its fleets can fly below cloud cover for more than 12 hours at a time, capturing high-resolution data even in extreme cold and under satellite-navigation jamming, without putting a crew at risk.

Advancing into North America

Hietala sees demand growing for Arctic-ready surveillance solutions and having established itself in Europe, the company is now advancing into North America, opening up an office in Ottawa. Surveillance testing of their airships is also underway in Alaska after the company advanced to the final phase of Project G.I., a technology initiative led by the U.S. Defense Department’s Innovation Unit. The trials have been set up to evaluate Kelluu’s tech capabilities under real-world Arctic weather and environmental conditions.

“For us, Alaska and Canada are not just new export markets,” Hietala says. “We see our Arctic-proven capability as having a real competitive advantage there.”

The company was founded in Joensuu, about 40 miles (60 km) from the Russian border, where long, harsh winters mirror conditions higher up. “Our technology might look a little bit different, but it works really well because it’s born in this Arctic environment,” Hietala says. Even Kelluu’s hydrogen fuel-cell technology had to be adapted to work in extreme cold.

Joensuu’s border location added the increasingly common challenge of GPS jamming and spoofing from the Russia side, which has given Kelluu a real-world test bed for making its systems more resilient to hybrid warfare.

From forest to defense

The company began in 2018 with forests, infrastructure and environmental monitoring. It was only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that demand grew rapidly for proven dual-use civilian technologies like Kelluu’s, allowing the company to move quickly into defense.

The move was boosted by the launch of NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA). Kelluu was selected from around 2,600 applicants and went on to become the first company in the program to get a NATO-wide Rapid Adoption Service Contract. “This opened up a fast-track potentially to customers in 32 countries across the alliance,” Heitala says.

Kelluu is part of a wider European defense-tech wave. Hietala points to Portugal’s TEKEVER, which also sells aerial intelligence as a service using fixed-wing drones, and Germany’s Quantum Systems, another civilian drone company whose defense business surged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine has changed the economics of warfare, showing that cheap, scalable civilian technology can now work alongside hugely expensive traditional defense systems.

“Why just because you paint something green, does it have to cost so much?” Hietala asks, comparing what he calls “exquisite” but expensive systems with technologies like theirs.

“Don’t get me wrong, we still need missile defence. We still need F-35s. We still need these expensive conventional systems,” he says, “but much cheaper systems can also be deployed in numbers to fill gaps. Especially in the Arctic, where there are so many gaps.”

For Hietala, lessons from the Baltic show why this kind of surveillance matters. Sabotage and other hybrid threats in the Baltic Sea have exposed gaps in situational awareness that he argues should not be repeated further north.

But surveillance in the Arctic brings its own challenges. Conventional drones, Hietala argues, struggle with the extreme cold and vast distances. “Yet the same level of situational awareness is needed in the Arctic as in the Baltic,” he says. “That’s why we need to invest in the Arctic now.”

The Finnish innovation paradox

Hietala says Finland is excellent at R&D and engineering but much weaker at commercialization and internationalization. However, this is gradually changing. Kelluu and others like ICEYE, Sensofusion and Kuvaspace are evidence of a new generation of Finnish companies venturing out through NATO and foreign defense and security markets before circling back home to find Finnish government contracts.

Bringing it home

This is the second startup that Hietala has helmed. Earlier, he built a software company with 250 employees in seven countries and a customer base that included NASA before “retiring” at age 39. “The plan was to sit back and invest in other companies, but Kelluu was too tempting.”

Despite the current international expansion, Hietala wants to build a global company from Joensuu, where he grew up and the company was founded, and right where the loss of Russian trade and connectivity has hurt the economy most.

“Being an extra-stubborn Finn, I am determined to build the company here and bring success and positive economic benefits to this region.”

At the same time, Hietala wants Finland to get better at commercializing its Arctic expertise, just as it has with icebreakers, and now with Arctic situational awareness. He also wants to use the NATO doors that Kelluu and others have opened to help other Finnish startups go international.

“We’re going to drag them there kicking and screaming if we have to,” Hietala says.