PARIS — Robin Radar got into drone detection in the early 2010s, when the company needed predictable targets to validate its bird-spotting radars, founder and CEO Siete Hamminga recalls.

The Dutch startup considered partnering with a pigeon club to release homing pigeons, the executive told Defense News in an interview at the DSEI UK defense show in London earlier this month.

In the end, the company turned to drones, their controlled flight allowing to validate detection – a practical move that would prove to be fortuitous. Today, drone detection accounts for a majority of Robin Radar’s revenue, with defense applications dominant, Hamminga said.

As small drones and swarms becoming a staple of modern war, “you need to be able to detect a large number of targets simultaneously,” Hamming said. “Since we came from the bird-radar world, in which there are always huge amount of birds in the air, that was no challenge for us.”

Robin Radar was Europe’s second-fastest growing company in aerospace and defense behind Finland’s ICEYE, according a Financial Times ranking published in March, with revenue jumping to €43 million ($51 million) in 2023 from €5.5 million in 2020.

Hamminga expects to scale up production capacity to at least six radars per week by the end of 2025, after the company increased the pace to four radars per week last year. Robin was producing around 20 radars annually about five years ago, the CEO said.

The Dutch Ministry of Defence in 2023 bought 51 of the company’s IRIS drone-detection radars to donate to Ukraine, then the biggest contract in Robin Radar history. The ministry ordered the same number of systems for Ukraine in 2024, with the newer radars equipped to be used on the move, and doubled that this year, according to Hamminga.

Roughly the size of a fat beer keg, the IRIS radar weighs 29 kilograms and can be mounted on a vehicle or a tripod. The radar costs less than $1 million per unit, Hamminga said.

The CEO says more than 200 of the company’s radars are now deployed in Ukraine to help detect Russian drones. He said Robin reached out to the Dutch MoD after seeing what drones were doing in the embattled country.

“Like other countries, the Netherlands asked Ukraine, `how can we help?’ and a lot of answers were in the direction of air defense, counter-drone systems,” Hamminga said.

As for many Western defense firms, the war in Ukraine has been a test bed for Robin. Feedback from the frontline prompted the development of a mobile version of IRIS, and the company this month rolled out a software update to extend the radar’s detection range to 12 kilometers from 5 kilometers, based on direct input from Ukrainian operators.

The company says the latest upgrade makes IRIS one of the first off-the-shelf radars proven to detect and classify Shahed loitering munitions and other fixed-wing drones at long distances, with every kilometer of extra detection providing defenders with “more precious seconds” to react.

The money from defense orders has allowed Robin Radar to scale up its business and hire talent, including “fantastic engineers” who wouldn’t have joined the company 10 years ago, according to the CEO. He expects to end the year with around 225 employees, from around 25 in 2020.

Within defense, the company is now seeing a shift from Ukraine to NATO countries investing in their own capabilities, as Western military leaders consider how to deal with a mass drone threat similar to the one on the Ukrainian battlefield.

Hamminga said Robin doesn’t compete with defense primes but fills a gap for short-range, cost-efficient drone radars, having distribution agreements with Thales, Saab and other radar suppliers.

It’s a niche also being pursued by the likes of Echodyne in the United States and Blighter in the United Kingdom, though neither shares Robin Radar’s background in bird science.

Robin Radar was among the first to commercialize a technology called micro-Doppler for drone detection, looking into the details of a radar echo to measure the Doppler effect caused by moving parts such as rotors.

A plan to identify bird species on radar through a database of wing beats didn’t work out in part due to the “ridiculously large” number of species, but was the key to distinguishing birds from drones, the executive said. Robin Radar is now combining micro-Doppler signatures with machine learning to grow the classification database for drones.

Work on the underlying technology started at Dutch research institute TNO in 1980 as a project to prevent bird strikes for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, called Radar Observation of Bird Intensity. Hamminga, a tech entrepreneur working with TNO, spun out the company from the institute in June 2010.

The CEO said Robin couldn’t build something like the Thales Smart-L long-range radar, and “we don’t have that ambition,” but the French company used Robin Radar systems to help protect the Olympic Games in Paris.

As the defense business grows, Robin Radar remains committed to civilian markets, the CEO said, calling the radar maker typical of a new breed of company not focused solely on defense. He said both airports and wind farms are growth markets for bird radar.

“I think you will see in the next five years that the most successful companies and successful scale-ups will have that characteristic, dual use, civil and military,” Hamminga said.

The company’s 2030 plan envisages Robin Radar entering the market for unmanned traffic management as drones integrate in commercial airspace, with the radar maker “moving from protecting against drones to also facilitating commercial drone cases,” Hamminga said.

Robin Radar won its first major order in 2012 from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, its launch customer, and the civil business these days is roughly split between bird-detection radars for aviation and wind farms, according to Hamminga.

The company in 2014 received a Dutch government grant to pursue a feasibility study into solutions for detecting and eliminating drones.

Dutch investment firm Parcom became a majority owner in 2024, as Hamminga sought a new shareholder able to “bring Robin Radar to the next level.”

“This is a private equity who will fund almost any good idea if it makes sense, so it gives me flexibility to grow,” the CEO said. “Of course, I feel the pressure – I can be very satisfied about the growth we had, but for them that’s point zero, and now we need to go times three.”

Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.