Monava closes funding round as demand for passive drone detection grows

Drones don't need to be seen to be dangerous, and that's exactly the gap Monava is trying to close. The Swedish-Finnish company builds acoustic sensors paired with AI that listen for drones rather than scan for them, which means the system never emits a signal an enemy could detect or jam. That passive design is the whole pitch: radar and RF detectors give away their own location the moment they switch on, while a microphone array just sits there and listens.

The company just wrapped a funding round led by Gungnir Capital, with Foundry Ventures and Hede Capital also chipping in. Gungnir's Max Villman is joining Monava's board, which tells you how hands-on this investor plans to be. The money is earmarked for two things: getting the product ready for wider commercial rollout, and scaling up the team fast enough to keep pace with orders that CEO Alexander Hebbe says are arriving faster than the company expected, on a daily basis.

That demand isn't hypothetical. Monava's sensors are already deployed across the Nordics and in Ukraine, where the company has spent time testing alongside armed forces to build the kind of trust that defence buyers don't hand out easily. Villman points to a grim statistic to explain the urgency: drones now account for roughly 70 percent of casualties in the Ukraine war, a number that has turned drone detection from a niche capability into a front-line necessity almost overnight.

Hede Capital's Patrik Olson frames Monava's tech as useful beyond just battlefields, noting the sensors can pick up threats in the air, on the ground, and in water, which opens the door to civil protection use cases alongside military ones. Whether Monava can scale its organisation as quickly as its order book is growing remains the open question, but the investors clearly think the operational track record in an active war zone is proof enough that the technology works outside a lab.