Inleap Photonics Secures 20 Million Euros for Laser-Based Drone Defense

German deep tech startup Inleap Photonics has closed a seed round led by UVC Partners, pushing its total funding to around 20 million euros. The Hanover-based company had already raised a pre-seed round led by HTGF and came out of stealth earlier this year. This time, investors also included Balnord, Sentris and Scale Capital.

Inleap is a spin-off of Laser Zentrum Hannover, and its core business is high-precision laser beam steering. The company’s main product, Fastlight Shield, is built to neutralize drones in fractions of a second by hitting identified weak points. It also says the system is eye-safe, which is the sort of claim that matters if you want to use it somewhere more crowded than a military range.

There is also Fastlight HELD, a second setup that pairs the laser effector with an all-terrain unmanned ground vehicle and a C-UAS software platform. The new money is meant for four things: standardizing manufacturing and testing, further developing the core tech, expanding sales and service across Germany and Europe, and tightening quality assurance and certification. The company also plans more sites in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

That manufacturing push is the real story here. CEO Marius Lammers says the company is seeing strong order intake and now needs to deliver at larger volumes. CTO Felix Wellmann puts it more bluntly: series production means every unit has to be built, tested and approved under identical conditions. UVC’s Amanda Birkenholz, meanwhile, is pitching the investment as dual-use infrastructure for airports, energy facilities and data centers as much as defense sites.

Inleap also says it is already working with Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defence and the Bundeswehr’s Cyber Innovation Hub. It showed its UGV system publicly in the spring at the Bundeswehr Innovation Center’s tech event at Erding Air Base, where NATO UAS class I and II counter-drone systems were being reviewed. The Bundeswehr is looking for mobile systems that can be tested this year and delivered from 2027 onward, but a contract is still open.