In the summer of 2021, Dimitrios Kottas made a move that would be unfathomable to most Silicon Valley engineers: after leaving his coveted position as an engineering manager 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 in a recent episode of StrictlyVC Download.
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.
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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.
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