2 days ago
Podcast pioneer to drone destroyer: Swedish founder's defence start-up
Karl Rosander is best known as co-founder of the world's largest independent podcast hosting company, Acast. But in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he has entirely reinvented himself, co-founding the drone interceptor start-up Nordic Air Defence.
Advertisement
Karl Rosander takes a break from his lunch to show off the Kreuger 100 interceptor on the conference table in front of him.
"It's actually here," he declares, picking up a model a little larger than a Toblerone bar or a cardboard tube for kitchen roll. "This is a prototype. It's not larger than this. This is the actual size."
The interceptor is "unjammable", he says, "because today, drones can be autonomous, which means they don't have any range of signal between the drone and the operator."
The company, he says, has developed "a special technology we're pretty secret about", with two patents pending.
"What we do is that we take away expensive hardware and replace it with software and clever aerodynamics. That means we bring down the costs a lot and we can mass produce it."
Advertisement
The Kreuger 100 uses an innovative method to control and propel itself. Photo: Nordic Air Defence
When I ask, however, if Nordic Air Defence, the company of which he is CEO, has produced a working prototype capable of flying at the speeds required to take down an Iranian Shahed drone, he avoids the question.
"I always start a company by building hype around it. Nice design. You build hype, you have a couple of angles for the press. And what that means you will be attractive to capital but also to talented people that want to work with you."
"What we're doing now it's we are getting production ready, and we're not there yet, but we are moving really fast, much faster than the old legacy industry that builds a very expensive, huge systems that take ten years to develop."
Advertisement
Karl Rosander is the co-founder of Acast. Photo: Malin Hoelstad/SvD/TT
Rosander is one of Sweden's most prolific tech entrepreneurs. He co-founded the podcast platform Acast in 2013, leaving the board five years later. He then co-founded the media micropayments platform Sesamy.
The idea for Nordic Air Defence was brought to him in late 2023 in his role as an angel investor. Three people, one of whom was "a very technically skilled person", presented to him with a plan to use "software and clever aerodynamics" to make a cheap drone interceptor.
"I said 'okay, is this going to work for real? Because if it does, it's going to be huge success, and we need it fast to meet the threat'."
Advertisement
They hired a physicist involved in defence research, who used "advanced simulation software" to check that the idea would work, and when they concluded that it would, he decided to go all in.
"In the third meeting with investors, it suddenly came to me. 'I've spent the last 27 years learning how to be an entrepreneur just to do this project'. So I told them in the meeting, 'I'm going to be the CEO'. Since then I've been working day and night."
For him, there is no essential difference between launching a media software platform like Acast or Sesamy, and developing military hardware.
"An industry that's about to change. That's my sweet spot," he says. "It doesn't matter what area it actually is - it's fun to work with defense and also with tech, because you can scale a lot. When I started with the company 15 to 16 months ago, you could see that this is an industry that has to change rapidly."
Rosander is not the only tech investor looking at defence. Daniel Ek, the Spotify founder, has become a major investor in the German drone company Helsing.
He argues that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has transformed the perception of the defence industry.
"Before that happened, as an entrepreneur in tech, or any kind of entrepreneur, it was not nice, it was ugly. It was sort of better to work with gambling," he says. "Now I get a hug when I tell people I'm working in defense. So it's an industry about to change. That's why I'm here."
The fundamental idea behind Nordic Air Defence is simple. A single Patriot missile costs $4 million, and even the cheapest air defence missiles cost $200,000, Rosander explains. This makes stopping drone attacks prohibitively expensive.
In Ukraine, Russia now brings drones to their targets at very high altitudes so that they cannot be shot down by machine guns, which are much cheaper, and then makes them dive.
If someone can develop a drone interceptor that can take out a swarm of drones at a low cost, it would be a game changer, particularly if it could be easily manufactured in Europe.
Whether Nordic Air Defence can achieve this feat is another question. On their website, the company displays an image of a box containing nine interceptors. Rosander is vague, however, when asked exactly what hardware his company is able to replace with software, or on how the revolutionary electrically driven "pulsed air" propulsion system will work.
"We are taking away a lot of controlling mechanisms, like servos, things that are expensive. On an aeroplane, you have a lot of flaps and systems. You have to do tests, tests, tests. And we take away that. We have this innovation in our way to control this little vehicle. No one has done this before."
Perhaps this is because he is the CEO and frontman rather than the technical leader.
But he is still confident that his company can execute its vision faster than established defence giants like Saab, Lockheed-Martin, or BAE Systems.
"Those big companies have great innovation, but they are slower than we are. Until a year ago, the procurement agencies were buying systems on a ten-year scheme. So they've already bought what's going to be delivered.
"But now everything has changed, because we need new stuff. And those large companies, they want to partner up with the companies like us. Sometimes they buy companies like us."
Advertisement
Rosander's colleague, Jens Holzapfel, who previously worked on security for the Swedish public sector, chips in to add that the Swedish Armed Forces are belatedly realising the strategic significance of drones.
"We're in the middle of that reform at the moment. Before the second Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Swedish army and many other European armies considered drones to be something very exclusive. You had low numbers. They were reusable. You used them for reconnaissance rather than for strikes. You basically thought of drones as unmanned aircraft. You didn't look at drones as ammunition, which we're seeing in Ukraine today."
Even so, his says, it will still take several years before the Swedish Armed Forces start to approach the drone capability of the Ukrainians. "They have innovated out of necessity, fighting for their lives. We have the luxury of not having to do that yet."
So, back to the question of what current prototypes of the Kreuger 100 can actually do. Nordic Air Defence is not yet allowing journalists to visit its research and prototyping unit.
"But do you have something that can actually fly?" I ask.
"We can fly," he responds. "Yes. We can say that."
