Resource · July 2026
After the Eagle S dragged its anchor across the Baltic seabed, NATO launched Baltic Sentry. These are the European companies now building the sensors, drones and software to watch the seabed, grouped by what they do, and many of them are hiring.
On Christmas Day 2024 a crude oil tanker called the Eagle S dragged its anchor for nearly 90 kilometres along the Baltic seabed, cutting the Estlink 2 power cable and four telecommunications cables. Three weeks later NATO launched Baltic Sentry.
Watching the seabed takes sensors that work where sound, light and radio each fail, autonomous vehicles that can stay down for weeks, and software that keeps them coordinated when the comms drop out. A decade ago that was the territory of a handful of prime contractors. Today most of the companies building it have fewer than 200 people, many were founded after 2020, and a lot of them are hiring. This is a guide for candidates who want to find the specific companies rather than read a broad market overview.
You cannot protect a cable you cannot see. Sound bends through layered water, cameras go blind within metres in murk, and radio barely works below the surface, so these companies detect what is happening underwater using sound, magnetics and optics.
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AmsterdamOptics11 builds OptiBarrier, an all-optical fibre sensing system that turns a cable into a passive listening curtain along the seabed, with no electronics in the water. In May 2025 it raised 17 million euros to defend Europe’s subsea cables from sabotage.
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LeknesHavguard, founded in 2023 on fourteen years of academic research, develops magneto-inductive and acoustic modems for communicating with and detecting things underwater, where radio does not reach.
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BerlinEvoLogics builds biomimetic underwater robots and acoustic modems, borrowing from penguin locomotion and the way dolphins signal through water. Its S2C acoustic communication is used across research and defence.
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KielELAC SONAR has worked on hydroacoustics since 1926 and still sits in the same size bracket as the startups around it. It builds sonar and hydroacoustic systems used by navies for detection and navigation.
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AthensSOTIRIA, founded in 2021, sells a passive sensor package it calls Nereid that pairs a pico-tesla magnetic sensor with a wide-band hydrophone to spot submarines, divers and uncrewed vehicles without emitting anything itself.
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RennesUnseenlabs runs a small satellite constellation that detects the radio emissions of ships at sea, including the ones that have switched off their transponders. The Eagle S was exactly the kind of dark ship it exists to find.
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Sensors only matter if something can carry them. These are the autonomous underwater and surface vehicles that patrol, inspect and survey without a crew, and this is where the gap with the threat is closing fastest.
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HamburgEUROATLAS builds the Greyshark AUV, whose hydrogen fuel cell variant has a claimed endurance of up to 16 weeks. In August 2025 Rheinmetall announced a partnership to integrate Greyshark into its coastal defence systems and co-develop future variants.
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ParisExail, with more than 2,000 staff, already operates at prime-contractor scale. In November 2024 a Thales and Exail partnership was selected by the French procurement agency for eight A18-M mine-hunting AUVs, with the SAMDIS 600 sonar, for the French Navy’s SLAMF programme.
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FarehamKraken has NATO Innovation Fund backing and a US special-operations contract worth up to 49 million dollars for its K4 Manta, a platform that foils on the surface then submerges. In a separate programme, the Royal Navy chose Kraken’s smaller K3 Scout in March 2026, buying 20 uncrewed surface vessels for Project Beehive.
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TrondheimMaritime Robotics is further along the commercial curve. Its Mariner USV has been on the water since 2016 and completed a single autonomous voyage of more than 7,750 nautical miles in 2019.
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CaudanRTsys builds the compact NemoSens and COMET AUVs together with passive acoustic monitoring systems, developed in close cooperation with the French Navy for anti-submarine work and mine countermeasures.
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PlymouthZeroUSV builds the Oceanus family of long-endurance uncrewed surface vessels for survey and patrol, and is extending into autonomous underwater sensing through partnerships.
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Once you have found something, you have to inspect it and coordinate the response, often with the vehicles out of radio contact. These companies handle the close-up look and the mission software behind it.
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DelftLobster Robotics makes the Scout, an underwater drone that produces sub-millimetre optical maps of the seabed, the baseline you need to spot tampering on a cable route. In June 2025 it signed a prototyping contract with the Dutch Ministry of Defence for a military-grade version.
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TrondheimBlueye Robotics builds compact inspection ROVs used for subsea and harbour inspection. In 2025 it won a contract to supply them to the Royal Netherlands Navy for mine-countermeasure and inspection work.
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Kielnorth.io sits on the data side, building the cloud platforms that turn raw output from underwater instruments into something a navy analyst can use.
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EdinburghSeeByte writes the autonomy layer, with software such as Neptune that lets a mixed fleet of vehicles share tasks and keep working when communications are limited.
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Poland and the Baltic states sit closest to the threat, and their companies carry the shortest histories. Most did not exist five years ago, though the group also includes one long-established shipyard.
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KatowiceSR Robotics raised 8.4 million euros in July 2025 from a fund managed by Vinci in the BGK group, to scale a fleet aimed at underwater inspection and the detection and clearance of unexploded ordnance around critical infrastructure.
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GdanskBlue Armada, founded in 2021, is the only Polish company in NATO DIANA’s 2025 cohort working on maritime infrastructure, developing hybrid-electric vessels built for missions of around two weeks.
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RigaSUBmerge Baltic, founded in 2022, showed its PIKE AUV at the DSEI show in 2025 and is developing a next-generation version targeting a 150-kilometre range, a 500-metre depth rating and a 20-kilogram payload.
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TallinnStickleback Robotics, younger still, is developing its Morpheus and Neo platforms, which it describes as carrying heavy payloads with swarm coordination.
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SaaremaaBaltic Workboats is the grown-up of the group, a shipyard that has delivered more than 200 patrol vessels to over 20 countries and now fits remote weapon stations to its Navy 45 WP platform.
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The pattern that runs through all four groups is size. With the exception of Exail and, at the shipyard end, Baltic Workboats, almost every company here has fewer than 200 people, and several have fewer than 50. Inside a small undersea company you tend to own a whole problem end to end, whether that is acoustic signal processing, autonomy in zero-visibility water, long-endurance power for platforms that cannot surface, or the naval architecture of a boat that runs without a crew.
Start with the company profiles that match your background, then compare current openings on the DefenceJobs.org jobs board, or explore more of the sector in the company directory.
