Baykar

Baykar is a Turkish unmanned aerial systems manufacturer founded in Istanbul in 1984 and led by the Bayraktar family: Haluk Bayraktar as CEO and Selçuk Bayraktar (an MIT graduate) as CTO, following their father Özdemir Bayraktar's death in 2021. The company employs more than 8,000 people and reported roughly $2 billion in 2023 revenue, over 90% of it exports. Its flagship products are the Bayraktar TB2 tactical strike drone, the Akinci high-altitude platform, and the jet-powered Kızılelma unmanned combat aircraft, with a UK aerospace foothold added via the December 2024 acquisition of Piaggio Aerospace.

The TB2's combat record built Baykar's reputation: deployed by the Government of National Accord in Libya from 2019, by Azerbaijan against Armenian forces in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, and by Ukraine from 2022, where Kyiv's use of donated Bayraktar drones made Selçuk Bayraktar a public figure and did more for the brand than any marketing budget. That record underwrote Baykar's move into export sales proper: on 5 May 2026 it signed its first Kızılelma export contract, selling 12 aircraft to Indonesia from 2028 with a local production centre attached, alongside a parallel Akinci deal with Saudi Arabia that Turkish officials called the country's biggest-ever aviation export.

Baykar's European manufacturing ambitions took a further step on 22 July 2026, when LBA Systems, its joint venture with Italy's Leonardo, unveiled the Astore Levante, a TB3-derived combat drone, at the Farnborough International Airshow and declared the venture fully operational, putting Baykar airframe technology into production on Italian lines. The Astore Levante gives Baykar a NATO-integrated, EU-manufactured product alongside its Turkish exports, diversifying its supply chain and positioning the company inside European rearmament procurement rather than only selling into it from outside.