This founder left Silicon Valley to challenge U.S. defense supremacy from Athens, and investors are paying attention

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.

This may seem less of a gamble today, especially as defense tech has never been hotter, but Kottas’ path to Delian has been a long work in progress, as he told this editor over a recent Zoom call.

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. While he said he can’t discuss specifics due to confidentiality agreements, the technologies he co-developed at Apple’s secretive division clearly helped inform what Delian is building.  

“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.”

It wasn’t just technological insight that drove his career change, though. A series of geopolitical events — watching the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict; seeing countries look to revise their surrounding borders; and recognizing how far behind European militaries had fallen — had begun gnawing at him. “I literally lost sleep,” he said.

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.

But Delian’s newer products reveal bigger ambitions. The “Interceptigon” series features concealed autonomous aerial and sea drones and vessels designed to lie dormant until threats appear.

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.”

It’s a model that Kottas says doesn’t exist elsewhere in the Western defense industry. It has also attracted investors who just provided Delian with $14 million in funding. Indeed, the startup announced on Tuesday that its earlier backers, Air Street Capital and Marathon Venture Capital, have led its newest capital infusion, which brings Delian’s total funding to date to $22 million. 

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, a tendency that some investors believe will make it difficult for startups like Delian to scale across borders.

“That concern is stronger right now in France,” Kottas acknowledged, though he argued the landscape is changing. And as evidence that fragmentation is being overcome, he pointed to European Union initiatives like Safe and ReARM Europe, designed to encourage cross-border defense cooperation.

The proof, he insisted, is already emerging, with companies like Portugal’s Tekever achieving unicorn status, and Germany’s Quantum Systems competing globally. “There are companies that raised […] a tenth of what their U.S. competitors raised, and they competed on the exact same market, and the European counterpart won.”

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.

In the meantime, what may set Kottas apart from many defense tech entrepreneurs is how personal the mission feels. Referring to U.S. aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin, Kottas reflected that it’s “different to build weapons in New Mexico that are going to be used on the other side of the planet,” he reflects. “That’s one mindset, [but] it’s different to build something that you know may be used to save your brother or your sister or your neighbor.”

This sentiment may prove Delian’s greatest asset, as it’s shared by entrepreneurs across Europe who view conflict not as an abstract possibility but as a lived reality. It drives the company’s focus on low-cost, rapidly deployable systems that can be churned out at scale, and explains its emphasis on tech that can be pre-positioned and activated when needed. It might also ultimately convince other European nations that geography matters more than nationality when it comes to defense.

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.”

“I do think fragmentation will be overcome in the coming years, and you can turn it to your advantage if you play it right.”