Finland's Kelluu Wins €15M NATO Innovation Fund Round for Airships Using Hydrogen for Lift and Power

A new Finnish-based startup has secured a coveted €15M from the NATO Innovation Fund to advance its surveillance airship technology, developing unmanned platforms capable of operating in harsh Arctic conditions.

In a first for a Finnish company, Joensuu-based Kelluu became the recent recipient of a €15 million NATO-backed funding initiative. Having completed national trials under the watch of the Northern Alliance, Kelluu’s craft has already moved on to undergo several test missions, including two major NATO exercises. The airship’s development is advancing under the umbrella of NATO’s accelerator program, the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA).

Purpose Built for Surveillance
The resurgence of interest in airships over the last decade has brought forward a variety of application considerations, but Kelluu has taken a very targeted approach. Their airships have been engineered for a very specific purpose—aerial monitoring. According to Kelluu’s company information, their airship surveillance platform can remain airborne for up to 12 hours, far exceeding the flight time of heavier-than-air drones while still delivering the accuracy of coverage that satellites are unable to match. The key advantage is that airships operate silently and without emissions, vastly different from helicopters or airplanes.

Designed For The Arctic, In The Arctic
A strong market advantage may come simply as a byproduct of being developed in Finland, since the challenging environmental conditions for test flights is ideal for evaluating operations in arctic areas. Kelluu manufactures the 40 ft (12 m) long airships in Reijola, North Karelia, roughly 60 km from the Finnish-Russian border. Approximately one-third of Finland lies north of the Arctic Circle, and the current generation of Kelluu hydrogen ships is touted as operational in Arctic temperatures as low as -22°F (-30°F).

Hydrogen as Fuel and Lift
Kelluu’s compact platform utilizes hydrogen gas to stay aloft, with a dual purpose for the choice of gas: propulsion. The craft uses a hydrogen fuel cell that powers the electric propellor, a proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell advertised as having extremely low emissions. PEM fuel cells don’t burn hydrogen; they consume it electrochemically. As a result, the fuel cells operate at relatively low temperatures, around 140 to 175°F (60 to 80°C), with no flame, no spark plug, and water as the byproduct.

Myth-Busting Hydrogen
Airship construction is synonymous with the Hindenburg, and the stigma attached to that disaster. Rather than skirt the concern, Kelluu chose to address it directly. CEO Janne Hietala acknowledged the perception problem in interviews, such as one given to the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Quarterly, where Hietala acknowledged that there is a real stigma to airships and hydrogen, but having unmanned platforms allows the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas and fuel. “It comes from not one single innovation, but hundreds of small innovations needed to make this work,” says Hietala, explaining that the company’s solution is one of design discipline.

The features combine a patented hydrogen-safe hull, a semi-rigid structure, and what Hietala describes as a new kind of pressurizer that removed the traditional ballonet, the internal air bag used to control buoyancy and help maintain envelope shape. The onboard hydrogen serves a dual purpose—for buoyancy, and feeding the fuel cell, eliminating the need for an internal combustion engine.

Hydrogen handling, operating procedures, and potential mission-specific fire risks remain practical questions, but the risk assessment is also categorically different from historical hydrogen airship disasters. The Hindenburg contained about 7 million ft³ (200,000 m³) of hydrogen and carried as many as 97 people, whereas the Kelluu airships hold a fraction of that volume of gas and are unmanned.

Manufactured In Ideal Testing Grounds
Competing surveillance platforms need to schedule expensive trial relocation campaigns to prove they can survive electronic warfare, remote testing that typically requires very expensive repositioning. For Kelluu, the ideal testing environment is their home base. Joensuu sits in an area where GPS jamming and spoofing have become a recurring operational problem, a byproduct of the company’s proximity to the Russian border and Russia’s Ukraine operations.

Company head of engineering, Niko Kuikka, described the challenging environment as “free interference,” and his choice of words was not meant as a joke. An airship that cannot navigate or hold a data link against jamming efforts cannot fly home, so resilience is an essential part of the design roadmap.

Because resistance to GPS jamming and spoofing is essential to the platform’s success, electronic resilience has become a core Kelluu capability. The airships rely on onboard sensors and processing to maintain course when satellite signals are disrupted, providing the kind of redundancy NATO planners consider as a baseline. Each airship can carry sensor payloads of roughly 13 lb (6 kg), allowing the craft to keep working even when GPS and other signals are being jammed, spoofed, or otherwise disrupted by electronic warfare.

Sized and Shaped for Military Advantage
The impressive endurance claims from Kelluu only matter if there is useful collection equipment onboard, which is why Kelluu’s payload bay is set up for swappable multi-sensor setups: LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), multispectral cameras, thermal imagers, and configurations like the AgEagle RedEdge-P multispectral camera for high-resolution RGB and near-infrared imagery. With the impressive array of tools, Kelluu states that imagery can be dialed in approaching one pixel to just 0.4 inches, or 1 centimeter of the ground equivalency in ideal conditions.

The current generation of airships has a reported range of up to 124 mi (200 km), with an operational ceiling of 0.6 to 1.2 mi (1 to 2 km) in altitude. By those statistics, Kelluu claims that five airships operating from a single base can cover about 11,600 mi² (30,000 km²), an area roughly the size of Belgium. All this in an airship that Business Insider reported as being difficult to detect by radar, quoting DIANA challenge manager Fabrizio Berizzi as saying the aircraft’s low radar cross section works to the advantage of the airship.

Positioned For Joint Platform Tasking
The pitch Kelluu likes to make is that their airships provide a “satellite constellation under the clouds,” persistent low-altitude coverage at a resolution satellites cannot match. The low-altitude surveillance extends the reach of sensors, radars, and cameras, and fills the gap between satellite passes or short-endurance drones. Rather than attempt to replace drone or satellite options, Kelluu envisioned a layered ISR picture (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) instead of a “we fly longer than drones” sales pitch. Even still, Kelluu statistics puts their airship at the extreme edge of competing drone endurance.

Top speed is around 33 mph (53 km/h), debatably unremarkable speeds except that an airship does not need continuous propulsion to stay airborne. The motor is there to fight wind and reposition, not to hold altitude. As Hietala has put it, “It’s physics.” A platform that gets its endurance from buoyancy rather than batteries can loiter over a sector for hours, while alternative reconnaissance platforms would already be home recharging.

Ambitious Growth Forecasted
Kelluu currently operates roughly 20 airships deployed in multiple countries, including Latvia. About 80 percent of Kelluu’s revenue now comes from government customers, according to Hietala, with defence uses growing far faster than civilian tasks. The company is forecasting to manufacture more than 500 airships for Western customers, with a longer-term target of 3,500. A second-generation airship, capable of multi-day flights and longer range, is expected later this year. About half of the company’s roughly dozen exercises to date have been run in Arctic conditions, aloft in areas where satellite signals are disrupted or absent, and their rigorous mission taskings give the company a concrete footing as it works to scale toward production targets.

Finland’s Kelluu Wins €15M NATO Innovation Fund Round for Airships Using Hydrogen for Lift and Power

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