Drones got cheap. The engines built to catch them did not. Greenjets raised $40 million betting it can industrialize the second problem. The money arrived from private capital and NATO's fund at the same moment.
Its $40 million Series A pairs Blossom Capital with the NATO Innovation Fund and the UK's National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), funding a roughly eightfold jump in production capacity.
The company's core claim: propulsion, not sensors or warheads, decides whether a cheap interceptor can catch a fast drone.
By March 2026 the scale of the problem had been quantified at more than 200 low-cost attack drones entering the operational environment every day. The interceptors able to stop them stay scarce, and the bottleneck sits at the back of the airframe.
TIMELINE: Greenjets — from engine shop to aerospace prime
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
2022 ──── 2024 ───── Jul 2026 ─────── H2 2026 ◉ NOW ──── 2027
🏗️ 🚀 💰 🔥 NEXT
Founded EDF to $40M Series A Demo trials Production
by two turbofan + LCADE award with UK MOD thousands/yr
engineers
Chronology from company disclosures and UK MOD announcements.
The interceptor math changed
Air defence used to run on arithmetic that favoured the defender. Interceptors cost more than the targets they killed, but the flow of targets was limited, so the trade held. That arithmetic has inverted. A drone costing a few thousand dollars now faces interceptors costing multiples of that, and the attacker sets the exchange rate.
Mass production flipped the ledger. When one side can launch swarms at industrial tempo, the defence cannot answer with individually expensive shots. It needs effectors cheap enough to be treated as expendable. That is precisely what LCADE, the Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors programme, is meant to buy.
The UK became the first of five partners to put suppliers on contract. The umbrella programme, LEAP (Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms), spans the UK, Poland, France, Italy and Germany, and each country will run its own competition before a multilateral phase.
Greenjets' round, led by Blossom Capital
Participation from the NATO Innovation Fund, the UK's NSSIF, Tanglin Ventures and NSFO Family Office. · Greenjets, July 2026
Why the engine is the constraint
An interceptor is only as fast as its propulsion. Conventional designs split into two camps: propeller-driven interceptors that cannot close on a fast target, and turbojets that spool up slowly and sit on constrained supply chains. Both lose to a drone moving at 500 kilometres an hour.
Propulsion is the constraint that determines whether an interceptor can close the gap on a 500 km/h target or vice versa.— Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky, partner, NATO Innovation Fund
Its answer spans electric ducted fans through to geared turbofan engines, built on a single technology stack that also covers aircraft integration and low-cost manufacturing. One stack, the company argues, means rapid iteration across propulsion, airframes and launch systems rather than a bespoke engine programme per platform.
Why not just buy the existing engines?
Confirmation criteria: demonstration trials later this year showing an interceptor closing on a fast target at a per-unit cost an order of magnitude below legacy systems.
Greenjets in five acts
The company was founded in 2022 by Anmol Manohar and Dr Guido Monterzino, who assembled a team from Rolls-Royce, General Electric, BAE Systems, RTX, Lilium, Cosworth and Formula 1. It is an engine company that the defence market came to find.
The founding logic was civil: propulsion architectures that would make future aviation quieter, faster and more efficient, with a reduced certification burden. The same stack turned out to be directly applicable to interceptors.
Programmes now span NATO, the UK Ministry of Defence and the German MoD. The company runs from the UK and Germany, with a growing presence in India, the Middle East and the United States.
In July 2026 the UK MOD named it one of three companies under the Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors programme, with £3.16 million awarded across the three suppliers to develop British low-cost interceptors. Demonstration trials begin later this year.
CEO Anmol Manohar: "We are extremely proud to have been awarded this contract under LCADE and to be demonstrating the role innovative British businesses can play in rapidly strengthening national defence capabilities."
Over the past year the company expanded from 12,000 to nearly 70,000 square feet of UK facilities and from roughly 160 to more than 250 people. The whole exercise is a transition from development to production.
The money behind the engines
Blossom Capital led the Series A. NSSIF followed, alongside Tanglin Ventures, NSFO Family Office and the NATO Innovation Fund.
The investor mix is the story. NATO's fund exists to back exactly this class of Allied supply-chain technology. NSSIF is UK sovereign money, deployed into a private company's production scale-up. Their co-presence turns a routine round into a signal about procurement intent: the state is aligning its balance sheet with a specific propulsion bet.
The three LCADE suppliers are not substitutes for one another. They are three different answers to the same cost problem.
| Parameter | Greenjets | Cambridge Aerospace | Frankenburg Technologies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Approach | ✔ Propulsion-led, shared engine stack | ◐ $30,000 kinetic interceptor | ◐ Mass-manufactured missiles |
| Capital | ✔ $40M Series A (July 2026) | ✔ $300M (raised August) | — Undisclosed |
| Backers | ✔ Blossom, NATO Innovation Fund, NSSIF | ✔ State-anchored orders, US Army trials | — Not disclosed |
Cambridge Aerospace is the name our readers already know. Frankenburg Technologies promises low-cost, mass-manufactured missiles. Greenjets sells the layer underneath both: the engine that makes an expendable interceptor possible at all.
From hundreds to thousands
Manohar told Tectonic Defense that the funding goes to production scale-up, with capacity rising roughly eightfold from hundreds of units a month to thousands. The stated goal: delivery of thousands of systems over the next 12 months.
The sector has heard delivery promises before. What separates this bet is the multiplier applied to a component, not a finished weapon. Engines feed every platform in the portfolio, which is why the round is framed around capacity rather than a single contract.
Roughly eightfold is a claim, not a proof.
What it means for the category
As we wrote in August, Cambridge Aerospace raised $300 million to turn its $30,000 interceptor into a mass-production line. Greenjets is betting on the layer underneath: the propulsion that makes such interceptors possible at scale in the first place.
The UK Defence Investment Plan commits more than £750 million to short-range counter-drone protection and more than £5 billion to drones and autonomous systems. Its technology maps onto both lines, and LEAP's next phase will favour partners who can produce across the five nations, not just deliver prototypes.
The engineering choice of 2022, a shared propulsion stack aimed at civil aviation, is now a defence-procurement argument. Whether it holds will be decided in the demonstration trials.
Demonstration trials later this year — do they validate the propulsion claim against real fast targets?
Whether NATO Innovation Fund and NSSIF co-investment becomes the standard financing shape for UK counter-drone scale-ups.
Whether propulsion capacity, rather than sensor or warhead technology, becomes the binding constraint for the whole sector.
It wants to be the UK's next aerospace prime. Primes are built on production runs, and production runs are built on engines. The market has now paid for the engine.
