Tekever

Tekever is a Portuguese-headquartered drone manufacturer and the UK's most prominent defence-tech unicorn, holding more than £1 billion in cumulative UK Government contracts. On 15 April 2026 UK Defence Secretary John Healey named Tekever as a beneficiary of the £752 million drone package for Ukraine, the UK's largest single drone commitment, at the 34th Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting in Berlin. The same week Tekever's scale emerged publicly: it holds a separate £270 million block of prior MoD contracts and will open a 254,000 sq ft drone manufacturing facility in Swindon in summer 2026, the largest drone factory in Britain.

On 20 May 2026, Tekever announced a GBP 400 million five-year UK investment programme including a Bristol Centre for Autonomy opening in June 2026, and confirmed its selection as one of four companies for Project NYX, the UK's classified long-endurance autonomous systems programme. Simultaneously, Tekever opened a US office in Fayetteville, North Carolina, adjacent to JSOC headquarters, with SOF Week Tampa as the launch event, targeting SOCOM procurement with its combat-proven AR3 platform.

Founded in Portugal and operationally headquartered in the UK, Tekever makes the AR3 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone, which has accumulated more than 10,000 operational hours over Ukraine (with claims of 50,000+ hours at unit level). The AR3 has been contracted under the UK's OVERMATCH programme, a five-year, approximately £400 million capability delivery agreement. The SEAKER anti-ship variant adds maritime strike capability. Tekever's investors include Ventura Capital, Baillie Gifford, the NATO Innovation Fund, Iberis Capital, and Crescent Cove. Tekever represents a structural shift in European defence procurement: a non-US, non-legacy-prime ISR supplier winning multi-year framework contracts once reserved for Thales or BAE Systems.