PDKinematics Raises €2 Million to Scale GNSS‑Independent Drone Guidance Systems Across NATO

Every month, an estimated 300,000 munitions are dropped from drones over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine. The overwhelming majority of them are unguided. Pilots have had to compensate by flying dangerously low often within effective range of small arms simply to achieve acceptable accuracy. A Vilnius‑based startup founded in direct response to that battlefield reality has now raised €2 million to manufacture a different answer.

PDKinematics announced the close of its Seed round on June 17, 2026. The round was co‑led by Coinvest Capital, Lithuania's sovereign investment fund, and Iron Wolf Capital, a defence‑focused venture investor. A group of defence‑specialist angel investors and experienced technology founders also participated. The capital will be deployed toward scaling manufacturing capacity, broadening deployments across Europe and Ukraine, and accelerating a research and development pipeline that includes next‑generation electronic warfare countermeasures.

The Problem PDKinematics Was Built to Solve

The precision guidance systems that defined 20th‑century warfare were engineered for large aircraft and high‑budget programmes that only nation‑states with substantial defence budgets could afford. They were never designed for the high‑volume, low‑cost, attrition‑based drone warfare that has come to define the conflict in Ukraine and increasingly shapes NATO planning assumptions.

The founders of PDKinematics Rapolas Markevičius, Simonas Stasevičius, and Dominykas Rinkevičius identified that gap as a solvable engineering problem. Markevičius had a background in private equity; Stasevičius brought aerospace engineering expertise. The two began working on precision‑guided munitions for UAVs in 2022, shortly after Russia's full‑scale invasion of Ukraine began. Rinkevičius joined as co‑founder and head of engineering in 2025.

Their flagship platform, Gannet, is a low‑SWaP‑C (size, weight, power, and cost) precision guided munition kit designed to attach to standard multi‑rotor UAV platforms. The system operates entirely without satellite navigation it does not rely on GPS or any other GNSS signal which means it continues to function in contested electromagnetic environments where GPS jamming and spoofing are routine. Operators can deploy munitions accurately from altitudes of up to 700 metres, well outside effective small arms range. The guidance stack covers electro‑optic systems, actuation systems, and inertial navigation, with the company supplying both hardware kits and associated software and firmware.

Validated in Combat, Selected for NATO Exercises

PDKinematics is not a laboratory‑stage company. Gannet has been deployed in active front‑line operations in Ukraine, where the operational environment represents one of the most demanding electronic warfare landscapes in modern history. The company has also established a strategic partnership with US‑Ukrainian firm Bavovna.ai, integrating Gannet into Bavovna's bomber‑class UAV platforms.

The battlefield validation has been supplemented by institutional endorsement. PDKinematics' systems were selected for Iron Wolf 2026, Lithuania's largest international military exercises, providing direct performance data in a NATO‑standard operational context. The company is also working with the Lithuanian Military Academy, which has tested the armoured‑piercing capabilities of its munitions. The Gannet system's 500‑gram payload capacity for the warhead is rated to penetrate up to 30 to 40 millimetres of armoured steel, making it effective against light armoured vehicles, logistics infrastructure, and armoured personnel carriers at extended range. Trials are also underway with Italian UAV manufacturer SiraLab ahead of the Task Force X exercises.

The Investor Case

Viktorija Trimbel, Managing Director of Coinvest Capital and co‑founder of the Defence Angels European Network, described precision guidance as the foundational capability of modern drone warfare. She noted that PDKinematics was initially surfaced to Coinvest through the defence angel network, after which the Lithuanian Riflemen's Union invited the team to stress‑test their solution at The Flaming Shield exercises. That evaluation putting the technology in front of actual military end‑users served as the trigger for the investment decision.

Žygimantas Susnys, Founding Partner of Iron Wolf Capital, framed the thesis in terms of entrepreneurial speed and engineering depth, noting that the team has earned credibility in Ukraine and is positioned to become a defining defence technology company for NATO allies.

The round sits within a broader 2026 funding wave directed at European drone and counter‑drone infrastructure. Quantum Systems closed a €150 million financing package, and earlier‑stage rounds have reached companies across the UAV software, guidance, coordination, and counter‑drone layers. PDKinematics' positioning as a component supplier rather than a platform builder is deliberate. Companies like Helsing reportedly pursuing funding at an $18 billion valuation and Quantum Systems are competing to own the full drone platform. PDKinematics sells to those companies and to the armed forces that deploy them, which makes it a potential supplier to the entire European drone hardware ecosystem rather than a single‑platform bet.

What the Capital Will Fund

Beyond manufacturing scale, PDKinematics is developing a proximity fuse for armoured‑target engagement designed for integration into loitering munitions and interceptor drone platforms. The company is also advancing anti‑electronic warfare technologies intended to reach market‑ready prototype status by the end of 2026. Total capital raised since founding now stands at €3 million, with the latest round taking the company from proven battlefield capability to structured production and commercial deployment at NATO scale.

The broader policy environment reinforces the investment thesis. The European Drone Defence Initiative, positioned as a flagship project under the EU's Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030, reflects a structural commitment to building indigenous drone capability across member states. NATO member states are collectively expanding UAV‑based attack capabilities, and the requirement for guidance systems that function in GNSS‑degraded environments is becoming a procurement priority rather than a theoretical requirement. A NATO member state naval deployment is also reportedly in the pipeline, signalling that the company's addressable market extends beyond land warfare applications.

For a company founded in Vilnius in 2025, the trajectory from first prototype to battlefield deployment to NATO exercise selection to institutional capital in under two years reflects both the urgency of the market and the advantage that proximity to active conflict zones the Baltic states share a border with Russia provides to defence technology founders who understand the operational problem at first hand.