An ex-Apple engineer just raised $14 million for his own defense startup, which borrows a key strategy from Apple and Tesla

NewsDave SmithEditor, U.S

NewsDave Smith is a writer and editor who previously has been published in Insider, Newsweek, ABC News, and USA TODAY.SEE FULL BIO Dimitrios Kottas, cofounder and CEO of Delian Alliance IndustriesCourtesy Delian Alliance IndustriesDelian Alliance Industries, founded by former Apple engineer Dimitrios Kottas, announced Tuesday it’s raised $14 million in Series A funding to accelerate duction of its affordable and autonomous defense systems

Kottas, who spent five years working in Apple’s secretive robotics lab, said he applied many learnings from his time in Silicon Valley to his four-year-old defense startup

Dimitrios Kottas spent years at Apple working in its secretive “Special jects Group” (SPG), working on autonomous systems for robots—and, for many years, was the team most closely associated with ject Titan, Apple’s since-canceled car ject

Our duct lineup ranges from autonomous detection to autonomous one way effectors” Rather than partnering with other defense companies and startups, Delian is borrowing a page from Apple, as well as Tesla, in that it’s choosing vertical integration as its key strategy around duction

It makes its own hardware—targeting systems, surveillance towers, drones, and more— as well as the software and systems, which are all “designed to be low cost, deployed in mass, and sovereign,” according to the company’s website. “Why do we pursue vertical integration? Speed,” Kottas told Fortune. “Look at the speed that Tesla moved versus its European competitors who sub-contracted out everything to hundreds of different suppliers

By bringing everything under one roof we can move at the speed we need to equip our allies in the face of a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape.” Kottas, who graduated from the University of Minnesota after years of studying computer science and reing machine learning, said Silicon Valley also taught him the importance of embracing “moonshot” jects, which are ambitious ideas that may result in revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, change

Some of its totypes reflect this concept, including explosive-laden high-speed boats that launch out of concealed locations to deter attacks by air or by sea. (Kottas told The Financial Times Delian is focused on “the maritime domain,” as airborne drones are a “very saturated market.”) “Our adversaries are arming themselves with emerging nologies at a rapid industrial scale,” Kottas wrote in a company blog post. “We’re in a race against time and should measure deployments in days, not decades

We’ve ven our systems in mission critical environments and will now ramp up duction internationally.” Delian, which has offices in Athens and London, says it’s built to integrate with “Europe’s evolving defense priorities.” The EU is having a defense boom right now: Ever since President Trump signaled that Europe is no longer a security priority for the U.S., several EU countries have accelerated their own investments as they attempt to reduce their dependency on U.S. support

As you might imagine, defense companies and startups Delian are reaping the benefits of these policy shifts

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