Paris radar start-up Gallium Defense raises €7.1M seed, led by Keen and 360 Capital, for low-cost drone detection

TLDR

• Paris start-up Gallium Defense raised a €7.1M seed to build a lower-cost radar for detecting drones.¹²
• Keen Venture Partners and 360 Capital led; Omnes Capital and Polytechnique Ventures also invested.²³
• It is pre-revenue, targets about €500,000 per radar, and says most prospects are armed forces.¹³

Paris-based Gallium Defense has raised a €7.1M seed round led by Keen Venture Partners and 360 Capital, with Omnes Capital and Polytechnique Ventures also taking part, according to Resilience Media and EU-Startups.¹² The money will go on industrialising its first products, hiring, training its AI models and running civil and military demonstrations, EU-Startups and Tech Funding News report.²³ The announcement was timed to European Defence Week in Paris.² The sources give no valuation, no total raised to date and no split of which investors are new.¹²³

The company's GDS-10 is an X-band AESA radar with a software-defined, AI-native design. It comes in one version for critical infrastructure and one for armed forces, and the company says it detects small Class 1 and FPV drones at 10 km and tracks swarms in all weather.² Tech.eu notes the 10 km figure was shown under controlled conditions, with favourable weather and known target locations.⁴ Chief executive Eric Fournier told Resilience Media the target price is about €500,000, against €2M to €5M for comparable radars, and credited 5G gallium-nitride components for cutting antenna cost by more than 90 per cent.¹ Tech Funding News describes the firm as pre-revenue with six prospects and a goal of about €6M in orders in 2027.³ Resilience Media counts 48 prospects, of which only two are civil (energy or data centres) and the rest armed forces; orders open in the first quarter of 2027 and first deliveries could come in June.¹ Tech.eu instead reports five potential memoranda of understanding under discussion, so the pipeline figures measure different things and no customer or contract is named.³⁴ Fournier told Resilience Media "most of the guys are indeed the armed forces, which was not our entry point."¹

Gallium Defense was incorporated in April 2026 by three former Boston Consulting Group colleagues: Fournier, chief technology officer Florian Lemoine (previously at France's DGA procurement agency and NATO's Allied Command Transformation) and chief operating officer Robin Mandel (previously at Thales and Safran).²⁵ Before the round, Fournier described air detection as the main capability gap for NATO members and allies, and the company said it planned to show its first product in early November.⁵ Tech.eu quotes him saying the plan is "to be a great supplier and to be integrated by the primes."⁴ Les Echos set the round against the slow start of French defence start-ups, noting in its standfirst that German rivals raised ten times more this year; only that standfirst and the opening paragraph were readable behind the paywall.⁶

On investors, Keen's portfolio includes Perciv AI (AI software for radar), Intelic (defence software for unmanned systems), DeltaQuad (vertical take-off drones) and Tulip Tech (UAV batteries).⁷ Keen says Intelic signed a three-year Dutch Ministry of Defence partnership worth more than €30M, and Reuters reported in January 2025 that Keen was raising a €125M European defence fund focused on drone and radar technology.⁷⁸⁹ Sifted reported in March 2026 a €85M first close for a 360 Capital deeptech fund backed by a European defence prime, which Defence Jobs EU names as Poli360 2 with missile maker MBDA as a limited partner.¹⁰¹¹ A directory of defence investors says 360 Capital has no stated defence mandate, and lists Arbe (imaging radar), Unseenlabs (radio-frequency detection) and iNGage (navigation without GPS) among its holdings.¹¹ The sources do not describe Omnes Capital's or Polytechnique Ventures' defence holdings.

Why it matters: a seed-stage radar company with no revenue has drawn a dual-use specialist and a deeptech generalist on the claim that drone detection can cost a fraction of what comparable radars do, a claim the sources show only under controlled test conditions.¹³⁴⁷¹¹ Watch whether the 2027 order book turns the armed-forces prospects into contracts at the targeted €500,000 price.¹³