TEKEVER

TEKEVER was started in 2001 by engineering graduates of Lisbon's Instituto Superior Tecnico and spent its first decade as a general technology house before autonomous systems became the centre of the business. It is now usually described as British-Portuguese: the registered headquarters sits on the Lisbon waterfront, but a large share of manufacturing and engineering has moved to the UK, with sites in Bristol, Swindon and Aberporth in west Wales alongside offices in Toulouse, Odense, Tallinn and Fayetteville, North Carolina. A funding round in 2025 that included the NATO Innovation Fund pushed the company past a billion-dollar valuation, which made it one of the few European defence firms to reach that mark without a state parent behind it.

The unmanned aerial systems unit is what most people know. The AR3 is a fixed-wing tactical aircraft with vertical take-off and landing, used for shorter-range land and maritime reconnaissance. The AR5 is the larger platform, satellite-linked and built for long-endurance patrol work over water. Between them sit the AR4 and the ARX, and in 2026 the company added the AR6, a heavy-lift family designed and built in the UK with British suppliers and slated for production out of the Swindon hub. The aircraft are rarely sold as bare airframes. TEKEVER prefers to contract for hours flown and pictures delivered, which is why ATLAS matters as much as the hardware. ATLAS is the ground and onboard software layer that handles mission planning, live video, historical replay and vessel cross-referencing against existing maritime databases, sold as an intelligence service rather than a licence.

A separate space division builds spacecraft communications and Earth observation hardware. GAMALINK is a software-defined radio for inter-satellite and satellite-to-ground links, offered in a heavier deep-space configuration and a lighter CubeSat-compatible version. GAMASAR is a synthetic aperture radar payload small enough to fly on either a satellite or a drone. The European Space Agency has flown the inter-satellite link technology on the HERA asteroid mission and on PROBA-3, the formation-flying demonstrator, and funded ATLARCTIC, a study for a compact X-band radar satellite watching the Arctic and North Atlantic.

The digital division is the part of the company that has nothing to do with defence. It builds and runs applications and back-end systems for Portuguese banks, utilities and public agencies, including the Santander retail and business banking apps, the ePark parking payment service and the GIRA bike-sharing platform in Lisbon, electronic notification services for the state administration agency AMA, field operations tooling used by several thousand EDP technicians, and asset management software for GALP's gas distribution network.

On the defence side the customer list runs through Portugal, the UK, France, Spain, Denmark, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Nigeria and Ukraine. The Portuguese Navy and the French Navy fly TEKEVER aircraft, the UK Home Office has used them for maritime patrol, and the AR3 forms the airborne half of the Royal Air Force StormShroud electronic attack capability with a Leonardo payload. In July 2026 the UK selected the AR5 as the successor to Watchkeeper. AR3 airframes have logged well over ten thousand hours of combat flying in Ukraine.