TERASi's €11M Seed: NATO's Fund Backs Jam-Proof Tactical Radio

James Campion's first radio weighed about as much as a hardback book. He and two fellow doctoral students built it at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, aimed a narrow beam across the campus, and pushed data down it without a wire. That was 2020. Campion now runs TERASi, the company spun out of that lab, and the hardware has shrunk to something a person can carry in a pocket while the range has stretched past 100 kilometres.

On 22 September, TERASi closed an €11 million seed round co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund and JOIN Capital. In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor established by the CIA, and D3 joined as new backers. Navigare Ventures, Almi Invest, STING, Onsight Ventures, Further Than Capital and KTH Ventures all returned. For the NATO fund, it is the first direct investment it has made in Sweden.

The cheque is small. The signal is not.

Why a jammed signal became a board-level problem

Electronic warfare has moved from a specialist concern to a standing line item in modern force budgets. Cheap jammers can drown the radio bands that armies, navies and emergency services depend on, and the satellites those forces lean on are themselves contested. A unit that loses its data link loses its position, its orders and its targeting.

The round, line by line

The round values nothing publicly. No post-money figure was disclosed, and no secondary pricing has surfaced. What the filings and announcements do show is the shape of the syndicate: two lead investors, two strategic newcomers, and six returning backers from the company's earlier raises.

The lead pairing matters more than the amount. The NATO Innovation Fund is a €1 billion vehicle backed by 24 allied governments, set up to put institutional money into deep technology that allied militaries might buy. JOIN Capital is a Berlin-based early-stage fund. In-Q-Tel, which invests on behalf of US intelligence agencies, has spent two decades screening hardware that governments may later procure at scale. Their presence is the strongest scarce signal in the deal.

The capital goes to three things: wider deployment across European armed forces, including partnerships with unnamed defence primes; a larger engineering and field team; and a broader product line covering connectivity, spatial awareness and electronic warfare.

What a millimetre-wave link actually does

Most battlefield radios broadcast in all directions, which makes them easy to find and easy to drown. The company builds at higher frequencies — the millimetre-wave band, shorthand for radio spectrum between roughly 30 and 300 gigahertz — where signals can be squeezed into narrow, directional beams. A beam that points at one receiver is hard to intercept from the side and hard to jam without sitting directly in its path.

The engineering difficulty sits in the components. Millimetre-wave hardware has historically been bulky and expensive, assembled from discrete parts. The company manufactures its own silicon micro-machined parts and assembles the full system, which it says makes it the only European end-to-end producer of millimetre-wave hardware for tactical communications. The company claims links beyond 100 kilometres at gigabit speeds, with no fibre and no tower.

Editorial comparison based on company-stated specifications and the investor's announcement, 2026.

That last figure is the commercial pitch. A radio that reaches 100 kilometres replaces the relay towers and fibre spools that slow a unit down, and it keeps working when the satellites above it are being jammed or shot at.

Why NATO's fund signed the term sheet

The fund's mandate is narrow by design: deep technology with a defence or resilience application, sourced from across the alliance. Communications resilience sits squarely inside it. The fund's own framing of the deal is about a capability gap rather than a market opportunity.

This is why we're proud to back TERASi as the NATO Innovation Fund's first direct investment in Sweden.— Sander Verbrugge, Partner, NATO Innovation Fund

Read the geography. The fund has now written its first Swedish cheque, and it went to a KTH spinout rather than to a drone maker or a munitions firm. The pattern suggests the fund is placing early bets on the connective tissue of a modern force — the layers that keep hardware talking — not only on the hardware that fires.

The defence-comms capital cycle

This raise lands in a crowded field. Two months earlier, the US counter-drone startup Mara closed a $7 million pre-seed led by Khosla Ventures for a portable interceptor system; in July, Israel's Esh-Tech raised $18 million for a laser counter-drone line. As we wrote in September, Tycho.AI raised a $900,000 round for a man-packable counter-drone interceptor, and TEKEVER's $580 million Series D turned a Portuguese drone maker into Europe's defence unicorn.

Every one of those systems needs a link that survives jamming. That is the quieter half of the same trade. Counter-drone hardware gets the headlines and the larger cheques; the communications layer underneath it determines whether any of it works once the spectrum is contested. That layer is where the seed money goes, before the primes have locked in suppliers.

The risk is structural. Defence procurement runs on multi-year qualification cycles, and the primes it wants as customers also run their own communications divisions. A European champion in millimetre-wave tactical radios is strategically attractive and commercially slow to build.

Does an €11 million seed turn a seed-stage startup into a production supplier?

Development scenarios

Sources