From Apple to Greek Defense Start-up

jelizondo writes:

TechCrunch has an interesting article about an engineer who is challenging the Defense Behemoths.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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."

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

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