Inside Italian defence tech (2026)

Just north of Treviso, in Villorba, SUEX has been building diver propulsion vehicles since 2000. Its military line, the NERO series, carries a single rider, and the US Naval Special Warfare Command has issued a contract request naming SUEX's product specifically rather than opening the field to competitors, the concrete sign that American operators want the Italian unit. SUEX is one of only a handful of Western makers of military-grade DPVs, alongside Germany's Rotinor, America's STIDD and the Anglo-Swedish Torpedo SEAL. In January 2025 SUEX and the UK sonar-maker Blueprint Subsea combined under a new parent company, Aion Group, after defence work had grown into a large share of both companies' revenue.

Back in Livorno, Drass's other programme is closer to home. It is equipping the Italian Navy's new diving-operations and submarine-rescue ship, Olterra, launched at Genoa in October 2025 and due in service in the first half of 2027, with a saturation diving system rated to 300 metres for 12 divers from COMSUBIN, the Navy's special-forces diving unit. Saturation diving lets divers live at depth for days without repeated decompression. The ship can also embark SAVER, a submarine-rescue system Drass developed with Saipem. All of this sits inside a roughly 100 kilometre corridor between Livorno and La Spezia, where the Navy's test centre, NATO's maritime research lab and the special-forces diving base share the coast.

The government has now made that corridor a strategic priority in its own right. In December 2023 Italy inaugurated the Polo Nazionale della Dimensione Subacquea at La Spezia to coordinate underwater industry and protect subsea infrastructure, and the country's first report on the “underwater economy” put the sector at around €3.5 billion across roughly 189 firms. In July 2026 Fincantieri signed a package worth around €600 million to build a dominant Italian underwater-technology group, pending clearance under Golden Power, the law that lets Rome block or attach conditions to takeovers and big ownership changes in strategic sectors, whether the buyer is Italian or foreign. It is taking majority stakes in 2 companies we track: WSense, the Rome La Sapienza spin-off whose acoustic mesh networks connect sensors and drones down to about 3,000 metres, and Graal Tech in Genoa, whose Folaga and X-300 vehicles can glide, hover and land on the seabed. WSense's founder Chiara Petrioli framed the deal as a new phase rather than an exit. “We are maintaining our autonomy and identity as a deep-tech company, whilst at the same time strengthening our ability to roll out our technologies on a global scale,” she said in a statement reported by the Italian outlet StartupBusiness.

MED Defense in Cervia, on the Adriatic, builds military RHIBs (rigid-hulled inflatable boats). It says it has produced more than 200 professional boats and has supplied 150-plus to Italian public forces since 2015, from the Guardia di Finanza to COMSUBIN. Mirai Robotics, founded in Bari and backed by a pre-seed of just under €4 million in March 2026, is building crewless surface vessels for patrol and surveillance. Elesia, outside Rome, builds the shock-mounted operator consoles that go on warship bridges.

Italy's clearest space-scaleup story is D-Orbit, founded in 2011 in Fino Mornasco, near Como. Its ION Satellite Carrier flew its 23rd mission in July 2026 and has delivered more than 200 payloads to orbit. In 2024 D-Orbit closed a €150 million Series C, the largest Italian space round of the period, and in January 2026 it added a round of around €110 million led by the asset manager Azimut. It is the prime contractor for RISE, the European Space Agency's first in-orbit servicing mission, a €119 million contract to dock with and extend the life of a geostationary satellite from around 2028. “Space requires its own logistics backbone,” founder Luca Rossettini told the trade publication SpaceTech Gulf.

Argotec, in San Mauro Torinese on the edge of Turin, builds 25 of the 68 satellites in IRIDE, Italy's flagship Earth-observation constellation and a €1.07 billion programme funded largely through the EU recovery fund. That is the single largest block from any one supplier. The satellites are built at Argotec's SpacePark, an automated factory that opened in October 2024, and the company, which built cubesats for NASA's DART mission, has now opened its first US plant on Florida's Space Coast. Lombardy holds the other scaleup, Leaf Space near Milan, which runs ground-station networks for satellite operators.

Space is also where Italy has legislated. Law 89 of June 2025 is the country's first national space law, setting up an authorisation regime run by the industry ministry through the Italian Space Agency and mandatory insurance of up to €100 million per incident. The startup scene around it is densest in Turin, where the ESA business incubator, the I3P accelerator and the Politecnico feed a cluster that includes Kurs Orbital, an in-orbit servicing company founded by the former head of Ukraine's space agency, who moved it to Turin after Russia's 2022 invasion, Ecosmic, which tracks space traffic, and ORiS, which beams power to satellites. “This round is critical for our next step, delivering powerful and cost-effective rendezvous technology to the market,” Kurs Orbital's Volodymyr Usov said in the I3P incubator's announcement of a €3.7 million seed in 2024.

Not everything stays small. Officina Stellare, a Sarcedo maker of optical payloads and space-optics systems, is still listed on the Milan stock exchange, but in June 2026 a new aerospace and defence group about 59% owned by the private-equity firm Investindustrial took control of it. The centre of activity in Italian space has also shifted north. The southern space corridor that once looked like a rival hub has thinned: Planetek in Bari is now part of D-Orbit, and in Naples the launcher startup Sidereus wound down its programme in 2026. It was a technically capable young team, but it could not raise the money needed to build rockets in Europe. That shortage of capital, not technology, is the real constraint on the sector. The largest venture round any Italian defence-tech company we track has raised is D-Orbit's €150 million, and Italy does not appear in the country rankings that logged billions for German and British startups in 2025. The budget is among Europe's largest, but the private capital behind its startups has not caught up.

Italy was one of Europe's earliest big-drone operators, flying General Atomics Predators over Iraq and Afghanistan from the mid-2000s. Its one serious attempt to build a large drone at home, Piaggio's P.1HH HammerHead, lost its prototype in a 2016 crash and never reached production. So Italy's home-grown drone makers cluster at the small end, making mini reconnaissance drones, target drones and, increasingly, small explosive drones flown by a first-person video feed.

Sky Eye Systems, founded in 2017 near Pisa, is the clearest example. It is a joint venture between the family that owns the Foligno aircraft-maker OMA and Massimo Lucchesini, the former head of Alenia Aermacchi. Its Rapier X-25, a catapult-launched reconnaissance drone certified toward the NATO STANAG 4703 airworthiness standard, went to the Italian Air Force's drone centre of excellence at Amendola, and in December 2022 the Army followed with a €9 million contract of its own. “Sky Eye Systems has one of the only certified UAVs in this category, meaning it can fly without restriction,” its head of marketing and sales Giovanni Fumia said in a Dassault Systèmes customer story.

AURYN Aero in Rome builds drones designed to attack rather than watch. It openly sells small first-person-view strike drones, including the AY-100, alongside target drones like the reusable AY-44Q “Zombie”, which is built to be shot down in counter-drone training and then rebuilt in the field. Few other Western European small firms advertise a strike drone this openly. Siralab Robotics in Terni, now majority-owned by Dronus, supplies tactical mini and micro drones to armed forces and police, and Nimbus UAS near Turin has been building tactical drones since 2006, flying homeland-security missions with the state police.

The drone business is also where Italy's vetting of foreign takeovers has bitten hardest. Alpi Aviation, which makes the backpack-portable Strix mini-drone, was found in 2018 to have been quietly sold 75% to Hong Kong buyers at roughly 90 times the shares' face value. Under a 2022 government decree the stake was divested, returned to a co-founder in 2023 and finally sold to the private-equity-backed Movinter in 2025. SunCubes in Milan is a good example of dual-use technology, built to serve civilian and military buyers at once. It is building DEEP LIGHT, a blue-green laser meant to recharge underwater drones on the seabed so they never surface, a project the La Spezia underwater programme picked in early 2026. Stratobotic in Turin flies a reusable, high-flying aircraft designed to stay aloft for long stretches and do the job of a satellite, and Evolunar, a Politecnico di Torino spin-off, is building a drone to fly on the Moon.

Rome's defence-electronics cluster grew out of an older generation of companies. Elettronica, the country's top electronic-warfare company, started in a small laboratory on Via Tiburtina in 1951 with 25 employees, and Selenia, a radar and missile house, employed nearly 13,000 people around the capital at its 1980s peak before it was folded into what is now Leonardo. Decades of that work built Rome's pool of radar, radio-frequency and electronic-warfare engineers, and the SMEs that sell to the nearby Ministry of Defence draw on it. Our data shows a cluster of around 17 to 18 companies in Rome and its Lazio towns.

DCube in Genoa builds VUHLCAN, the driver-vision system on the Italian Army's Centauro 2 wheeled armoured vehicle. By 2022, 5 units had been fielded, with around 150 anticipated and 2,000 kilometres of testing behind them, according to EDR Magazine, on a programme funded through Italy's national military research plan. ELDES in Scandicci, near Florence, builds radar and threat simulators that plug real hardware into a simulated battlefield, so armed forces can test electronic-warfare systems against simulated anti-ship missile seekers.

One thing our data does not show is an Italian counter-drone startup scene. Exactly 1 company we track in Italy, CPM Elettronica in Rome, has counter-drone jamming as its primary business, against 13 in the United Kingdom, 7 in Germany and 4 in France. CPM has spent roughly three decades jamming enemy radio and radar signals, with jammers fielded on operations for over a decade, and sells its Watson and Wilson jammer guns worldwide. Three rounds of scouting through federation lists, exhibitor catalogues and spin-off registries turned up no other independent Italian counter-UAS SME, leaving the niche to the primes.

The rest of the sensor segment is a spread of specialists. Eurolink Systems in Rome integrates rugged electronics for Leonardo, MBDA and Thales, and markets its own Beluga mini-drones. VirtuaLabs, also in Rome, says it has built more than 30 radar, EW and anti-drone products over 28 years. MetaSensing, an Italian-Dutch house south of Rome, builds synthetic-aperture radar, which produces sharp ground images from aircraft or satellites, at resolutions down to about 30 centimetres. Sentech designs cameras, infrared sensors and systems that locate the source of a radio signal, RF Microtech in Perugia makes electronically steered radar antennas (phased arrays) and radar for civil and military use, ICS Technologies on the Marche coast builds coastal-surveillance radar, and Nurjana Technologies in Sardinia builds weapons-testing ranges fitted with tracking sensors as well as space-tracking systems.

SITTI has been building air-traffic and tactical voice-communication systems since 1946, from Vimodrone on the eastern edge of Milan, not from Rome, where it is sometimes placed. It supplies the voice-switching systems the Italian Air Force uses across its air bases, has more than 120 systems installed, and lists customers from ESA's operations centre in Darmstadt to Gatwick and Edinburgh airports through a UK partner.

IES in Anzio has integrated military telecommunications and surveillance systems since 1990, and since 2001 has refurbished vehicle canopies for NATO's mobile electronic-warfare training fleet, supplying Leonardo, Thales and Northrop Grumman. It is better described as a military telecom integrator than an EW house. Gomedia Satcom runs a government satellite ground station near Catania that it calls the largest of its kind in Europe. Italiana Ponti Radio near Varese has spent 40 years building the wideband airborne data links that carry sensor feeds off manned and unmanned aircraft, and GELCO in Viterbo does the contract electronics manufacturing behind a lot of avionics and space hardware.

Two companies point at where communications hardware is going. CamGraPhIC in Pisa builds transceivers (the hardware that sends and receives data) using graphene and light instead of ordinary silicon chips, and raised a €25 million Series A co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund, part of why Pisa and its neighbour Cascina now form a fourth Italian cluster after Rome, Milan and Turin, driven by university spin-offs. Apeiroon near Vicenza builds rapidly deployable private 5G modules that talk to NATO-standard tactical radios. Not all of this hiring is easy to find. Page Europa in Rome advertises 16 openings only as PDFs on its own site, the kind of role that never reaches a job aggregator.

Gyala, founded in Rome in 2016 by a team including a former Finmeccanica cybersecurity chief, has one of the better dual-use origin stories in Italian defence. Its Agger platform was developed under Italy's national military research plan, then sold on to hospitals, utilities and factories. “We tested this technology for certification aboard a military frigate,” its chief executive Gian Roberto Sfoglietta told the trade site Sergente Lorusso, translated from Italian. Gyala raised a €5 million round in 2022 led by the state investor CDP Venture Capital.

DEAS Cyber+ in Rome runs a cyber hub inside an Italian military base and holds national test-lab accreditation, with over 100 staff. DigitalPlatforms, also in Rome, is an EU and NATO-certified maker of TEMPEST equipment, hardware shielded so its electronic signals cannot be picked up by eavesdroppers, and runs an accredited evaluation lab for both the military and civilian security-certification schemes. IPS Intelligence near Aprilia builds communication-monitoring and lawful-interception systems for governments, with monitoring centres in more than 40 countries, and lists 6 open roles on its own site.

AIKO in Turin writes the AI that lets satellites plan their own missions, with the launch-vehicle maker Avio among its customers, and has raised around €7 million. FlySight in Livorno, part of the Flyby group, builds AI drone-detection and geospatial software and works with HENSOLDT and Leonardo Helicopters. Atlas Engineering in Verona designs its own processors for what it calls physical and autonomous AI, pitched on not depending on non-European chipmakers.

Quantum is a small but real Italian niche. QTI in Florence secured the encrypted press communications at the June 2024 G7 summit in Puglia using its Quell-X encryptors and quantum-key distribution, a way of sharing encryption keys using quantum physics that makes eavesdropping detectable. It was a live deployment rather than a demonstration. It is backed by Telsy, part of the TIM telecoms group.

Ephos in Milan builds photonic chips on glass rather than silicon and raised an $8.5 million seed in 2024, with an added grant from NATO's DIANA accelerator that did not require giving up equity, funding a chip factory in Milan and a San Francisco team. levelQuantum, also in Milan and woman-led, was likewise selected by DIANA and is developing quantum-key distribution over satellite links, fibre-optic cable and beams of light through open air.

Veco Robotics, in Corigliano d'Otranto in the far south, builds a quadruped ground robot called Cesare. It has turned up at NATO's largest exercise of 2026, STEADFAST DART, and with Italy's Alpine troops, feeding live video and environmental data into allied battle-management systems. Legged robots that actually deploy on exercises are still rare, and this one comes from a town in Puglia.

Tekne, in Abruzzo, makes armoured 4x4s and defence electronics, the latter built on a 2016 framework with Thales that brought in about 50 of its former technicians. It is also a case study in the consolidation running through Italian defence. In distress, Tekne agreed in May 2026 to sell 70% to the US laser company NUBURU, a deal valuing the company at €52 million before the new investment and now under Golden Power review. It is one of several. Among the companies we track, the navigation-systems maker Civitanavi went to America's Honeywell, Alpi Aviation to an Italian private-equity buyer, while WSense and Graal Tech agreed to join Fincantieri, pending clearance. Every one of these deals needed government clearance under Golden Power.

Fluid Wire Robotics, a Sant'Anna Pisa spin-off, was the only Italian company in DualTech, the 2024-25 Turin cohort of NATO's DIANA accelerator, another link between the Pisa cluster and Turin.

Victrix Armaments, in Cazzano Sant'Andrea in the province of Bergamo, makes precision rifles. In January 2022 the Italian Army chose its Scorpio V in .338 Lapua Magnum as a future sniper rifle, to equip regular and special-forces units and progressively replace the Sako TRG-42, with early deliveries reported to paratroopers, Alpini and Navy divers. Victrix sits next to Gardone Val Trompia, the Brescia valley that has made firearms for six centuries.

R.I. Group in Trepuzzi, near Lecce, builds the deployable structures armies live in on operations, and supplied the Italian Army's Role 2B field hospitals, the mid-sized medical units NATO forces set up close to the front line. The company runs to around 130 staff, with offices from Kosovo to Djibouti. Parnisari Arms near Novara makes body armour, ballistic plates and helmets as a registered NATO supplier. Defshell near Brescia builds military tent systems and Role 1 field hospitals, the smallest and most forward level of military medical care, exported to more than 30 countries, and Teknel in Rome says it builds the shelters, mobile command posts and drone ground-control stations that go with them.

Italy is set to draw about €14.9 billion in subsidised procurement loans from the EU's SAFE instrument, one of the larger national allocations, and Leonardo plans to take its workforce from 62,700 to about 75,500 by 2030, some 28,000 hires. The underwater programme at La Spezia is building out, and Primo Space, Italy's first dedicated space fund, is closing its second fund, worth €120 million, after this summer. For anyone looking for the work, the catch is that much of this hiring never reaches the aggregators. Among the larger Italian employers we checked, most recruit through a single form, an email address or a PDF rather than a job board. At the time of writing we counted at least 26 open roles that exist only on company websites, 16 of them at Page Europa, 6 at IPS Intelligence and 4 at SITTI near Milan. Companies like Drass in Livorno are best reached directly. The atlas tracks 77 of these companies, with more arriving each month. Explore all Italian companies →