Brolis Defence Group, UAB

Brolis began in 2011 as a semiconductor laser venture rather than a defence company. Three brothers, Kristijonas, Augustinas and Dominykas Vizbaras, took work they had been doing on antimonide laser materials at the Walter Schottky Institute in Munich and set it up in Vilnius, on Moletu road, where the group still has its plant. That origin explains the shape of the business today. Brolis grows its own laser chips, which means the emitters inside a soldier's aiming device are made in the same building as the device, and the group can tune a wavelength for a customer rather than buying whatever the market offers. The same photonics work feeds markets that have nothing to do with soldiers, including laser sources used in quantum computing research, sold through Brolis Photonics Solutions while Brolis Semiconductors carries the defence and sensing lines. In May 2026 the Copenhagen private equity fund ETNA took a majority stake in the group, described by the advisers on the deal as the largest defence sector private equity transaction the Baltic states had seen. The Vizbaras brothers kept about 40 percent and stayed in charge.

The dismounted soldier is the anchor customer. The LP5X is the product the group is known for, an ultra compact weapon mounted pointer and illuminator carrying four laser sources, a visible pointer, an infrared pointer, an adjustable infrared illuminator and a flood illuminator built on a VCSEL, all running from a single CR123A cell with training, low and high power modes. Brolis puts it in service in 23 countries, four of them NATO armies. Alongside it sits the BPS14 night vision monocular, which pairs European image intensifier tubes with a Brolis laser illuminator and has been used by both Lithuanian and Ukrainian troops. Thermal imaging forms a third line, clip on sights at unity magnification for marksmen and sniper teams, stand alone sights rated for machine guns up to .50 calibre, and smaller universal devices that work clipped on, mounted on a helmet or used on their own.

Short wave infrared is where the semiconductor pedigree shows most plainly. The SWIR Sight S100U is a rugged long range weapon sight that produces usable imagery day or night and sees through dust, smoke, haze and fog that stop conventional thermal and image intensified optics, with a laser illuminator built in, motorised beam divergence and onboard recording. Beyond the rifle, the group builds stationary surveillance cameras for border and critical infrastructure watch, optical countermeasure systems, and OEM sensor and laser assemblies that go into airborne and naval platforms built by other integrators.

Customers sit in more than 40 countries. The largest single visible contract is at home, a 17 million euro Lithuanian Armed Forces order for LP5X pointers and BPS14 night vision that began delivering at the end of 2024 and ran through 2025, part of a Modern Soldier Equipment Programme budgeted at 1.2 billion euros to re equip roughly 77,000 soldiers by 2030. Everything is designed and made in Europe and free of US export control, which is the argument Brolis makes to European buyers tired of waiting on ITAR licences.