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Conversations with private companies: Tekever

June 2026 / 31 minutes

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Investment manager Chris Evdaimon talks to Tekever co-founder Ricardo Mendes about building a modern defence company and his experience working with both civilian organisations and the Ukrainian armed forces.

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Your capital is at risk. Past performance is not a guide to future returns.   Chris Evdaimon (CE): It is an absolute pleasure to have today the company of Ricardo Mendes here at our office. I’m accustomed to coming and visiting in Lisbon. Case in point last week, but today we absolutely have the pleasure of having you here to visit us at Baillie Gifford in Scotland. Ricardo is the co-founder and CEO of Tekever. It’s one of our private companies, portfolio companies, that is based in Portugal, but I think with a really pan-European heart, if I may say it in such a way. A company that is building and operating drones, predominantly for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, what the defence industry calls ISR, as an abbreviation, because I guess we’re going to use it later on and we don’t want to say these three long words again and again. For ISR purposes, be it for maritime security or for defence or for inspection purposes. So, I remember when we first met. Two and a half almost three years ago, right now. I came across a company that was already 20 years in the making. Essentially bootstrapped for 20 years but growing very, very rapidly and also very attractively profitable, which is more than you can say for the vast majority of the startups in the defence industry, with already very interesting missions being flown over the English Channel as well as operational success in the Ukraine, something that is top of mind for all of us here in Europe. Can you please tell us – a little bit though, because it is a 20-year story, so not as long as 20 years – can you tell us how this business came about, the different inflection points that you had over the years, and how things have culminated to where we are today. And welcome again, Ricardo. Ricardo Mendes (RM): Thank you, and it’s a pleasure to be here. Trying to summarise 20 years, or 25 years almost, in a couple of minutes is not easy. Tekever was a company that we created right out of college. So, I was 23 at the time and, this is in 2001, so iPhones weren’t around. But the idea we had was that everything was going to be connected. And that would make a tremendous difference in people’s lives when everything, your fridge, your car, everything would be connected. So, what we wanted was to build technologies for that. Then, it was in around 2009 that we figured that there were a few areas that were predominantly dominated by mechanical processes where we thought that data, software, and particularly AI would make a tremendous amount of difference. And one of them was precisely drones. And what we thought was that, if you are actually removing a pilot from inside the plane, you’re not left with an aeronautical problem. Of course it flies, right, but you’re essentially left with a software, data, communications and an AI problem. And that’s problems we know how to solve. CE: A computer vision problem too. RM: Exactly right. So, it’s the whole world of software, data, information. How do you do this? So, it’s in essence not about how you make a plane smaller. It’s about how can you make a computer fly, right? And we thought this is something we can do and we can make a difference. So, we went to market. It took us a long time. We built the entire technology stack, and we went to market in 2016. We won our first big customer, the European Maritime Safety Agency. CE: Still today a customer? RM: Yeah, still today a customer for whom we do surveillance all over Europe in the maritime sector, which is their business, their mission. And that allowed the company to take off in this area. So, we had other areas, but this area made a lot of sense. And so we found product market fit, and it took off. We had a lot of other customers, but the second big name was the UK government, the UK Home Office, for whom we still do the surveillance of the Channel. So, from that moment on, we had the two largest maritime surveillance systems in Europe, which are some of the largest in the world, if not the two largest in the world, based on this type of technology. And that really made the company to take off. CE: So let me connect a couple of things from the background that you just took us through. The flying computer as you called it right now, as well as the particular maritime safety use case. I remember when I came over to Lisbon for the first time, you both talked to me but also showed me. You have the copyright for that. ‘Our drones with Tekever are essentially datacentres on wings.’ I wrote it specifically in the investment memo. That’s how the CEO presented his company. Why is compute so important to be up there, kind of on the edge and have a lot of processing power? RM: In essence, what we’re trying to help our customers with is with the missions where you really want to avoid having humans involved. And so, the missions that are very long, or that are very tough, or that are very repetitive, or that are very risky for human life. And so those are the missions we take on, and so we build technology that is going to be working very far away, sometimes completely disconnected for a very long period. Normally, we’re talking more than 10 hours. We could be talking close to 20 hours. And once you have this type of asset, this type of capability, and it’s flying maybe – I think in kilometres, sorry – 300, 400, 500km away for 10 hours, you want to bring a tremendous amount of sensors to make sense of what’s going on, to understand what’s going on. And so, if you have a platform, let’s call it a plane, that’s very far away for a long period, it could be disconnected, it could or could not have GPS or other type of location systems, it could or could not have connectivity, it could have SATCOM, it could have direct links. But then it can have all the sensors. It can have cameras, radars, RF receivers. It could be doing a tremendous amount of things. How do you make sense of all of this? And that’s where compute comes in. So, everything we do is recorded. And it’s used in real time for a number of things. First of all, to help the systems navigate so that they understand where they are. Imagine if you have a manned plane flying somewhere, you have a pilot on board. Even if he doesn’t have GPS, even if he doesn’t have comms, if he knows the terrain, he can understand where he’s going, right? If you don’t have that, you need AI to do that. And to do that, you need to be processing everything you can in real time. So today our systems, for example, if they don’t have comms, if they don’t have GPS, they look at the ground and they understand where they are. CE: Which is one of the keys successes of Tekever drones operationally in the Ukraine. RM: Absolutely. Which is understanding where you are and being able to do missions even if there’s no communications, even if there isn’t any type of location service. CE: Even if you’re in the middle of winter with everything looking absolute white below because it has snowed. RM: And those are the difficult cases. How do you do this in these conditions? It’s extremely hard to do. This is one set of things. Then, the other set of things is, what are you looking for? For example, if you are over the channel, our main mission is understanding what’s around us and responding as quickly as possible. Because if you have, for example, a migrant vessel coming over, if they capsize, and it happens a lot, those people have minutes on the water, right? And you being able to detect it faster, and warning the authorities, and bringing them there to do search and rescue, to do the rescue bit, is paramount. Seconds count. And so, you need to be able to do this in real time and do it as automatically as possible. CE: I will come back to this in a second to also introduce the economic dimension to this, because it’s not about doing all of these things, but also doing it in a cost-effective way, which is also one of the reasons why I think we are winning as a company. But before that, I would still like to focus a little bit on the importance of vertical integration here. Can you maybe express how important vertical integration is culturally and philosophically for the company? RM: We believe it can’t be done in a different way, successfully. What you’re looking at, and I think all of us are living through this, is we’re living through exponential evolution of technology that comes from exponential evolution of compute. That’s where we are. We look at how things move so much quicker now than they moved last year, or a couple of years before. And to be able to keep up and actually stay ahead, and in cases like in Ukraine, it’s fundamental that you stay ahead, you need to have the entire company working at a tremendous pace that is able to take advantage of the latest advances in compute, right? And so, to do that, you need to be completely vertically integrated. And a lot of people ask us, isn’t it only about the software? And the answer is no, it’s not. You absolutely need to have the entire company on that very fast pace of development. Why? Imagine three weeks pass and you have a new chip, and you have the ability now to compute something else. That means that you can probably not only do more with what you already have on board, but it creates the opportunity, for example, to bring a new sensor on board. For example, a radar. CE: A new capability. RM: Exactly. Something that was just not possible to do at that price point, on that size, whatever, right? Something that was not possible. If you don’t have it. And if you’re playing a cat and mouse game – and this is more valid if you are on the battlefield in Ukraine, obviously, for example – then you’re at a disadvantage. Now, you want to bring a new sensor because you can now compute the results. Okay, let’s bring the new sensor. What changes do you need to do to the airframe to bring it, right? So, you might have to redesign the airframe, or you might need more power, which probably means a new propulsion system, right? So, all of this, everything needs to change. Constantly. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve put the entire company, all the teams and every aspect of what we build, working on this drumbeat. And this allows us to be agile in every aspect of the technology. CE: It is clearly one of the reasons why, for us in our investment case, it was a very, very attractive factor. And I remember you telling me again, unapologetically - I think I have written that in the investment memo too – that the company builds things that are, let me just quote you here, ‘cheap enough, capable enough’. And the agility that you’re talking about here is empowering the team to do 24-hour, 48-hour turnarounds when you have an active war zone, and you’re getting feedback from people in the Ukraine. You can do tweaks. It allows you to serve the customer much, much better. And I would like to tie this in as a modern new company in the defence and security sector, as opposed to the rigidity of the incumbents, of the primes, who in our mind have both much more expensive equipment that does not always necessarily work in programs that cannot move with the type of pace and with the type of agility that we’re talking about. RM: The big challenge this market has right now is how do you create capabilities that can win, while dealing with a significant scale and dealing with all the compliance mechanisms that a prime company typically gives you. So, this is the problem we’re trying to solve. You need to be able to couple agility with scale. You’re at a time where you need volume. You need to be able to swap a very small number of exquisite things with relatively larger numbers, or in some cases, in some products, really, really big numbers of very cheap things, which are attritable. So, you’re able to sacrifice the absolute assurance for speed. But you still need volume. And then thirdly, you need to deal with compliance. And this is a tremendous impact. You need to deal with the regulatory environment on multiple aspects, procurement, airspace regulations, all the national and supranational standards that you need to adhere to, at the same time as you’re trying to be agile and you’re trying to gain volume. And this is extremely difficult to do. And it’s the problem you need to solve. It’s not a technology problem. It’s an organisational design problem. That’s a problem we’re trying to crack. And to do this, you need to build a company that can operate at scale in an agile way. CE: Can I bring in a little bit of the economic picture here, and the unit economics, and the cost side? For some clients, we have the ability here, especially the non-defence-related use case, to also have a business model of intelligence-as-a-service, which is very special from a Tekever a point of view, that has a superior economics. It’s a good economic proposition, right, for clients? So. there is that dual use case for Tekever. RM: Absolutely. So, when we first started coming into this space, we thought that the defence scenario for us, the defence market, was pretty closed for us. And so, what we thought was, we’re going to start with a market that has requirements very close to defence, but not really. And that wants a very different thing. And that market is security or resilience, which is not the military organisations but the security organisations. So, let’s say your coast guard, not your navy. CE: Your police department, for example. RM: And there’s a number of different characteristics. One of them is that they can’t afford to have large fleets, in most of the countries. They can’t afford to have large fleets of assets and a bunch of pilots and then have maintenance technicians and all that. So, what if we came to the market? And remember, we come from the software world. ‘As-a-service’ has been in place for 20 years. What if we did this as a service? And so, what we came up with was, let’s do this service called intelligence-as-a-service, where we not only build the entire system, the software, the hardware, the whole thing, but we operate it for the customer, and we charge a monthly fee. And that’s basically how we came to market. And it’s exactly what these entities want. When we started coming into the defence world, what we understood was, because we were born this way – where not only do we have the engineers, the manufacturing capability, but also we have the operational teams, the pilots, the technicians, etc – that it worked in a feedback loop with the engineering, product development, production. This created us as a very, very different company. And so, we work with our users on the military side. On the military side, we don’t fly our drones. So over Ukraine, for example, it’s the Ukrainian armed forces that fly our drones. But we work with them on the same feedback loop that we started working with our own teams. And we were already working like that. CE: I was there, I think, in one of the visits to the company in one of our locations in Portugal with four or five really big and well-trained Ukrainian officers being trained to be operators of our drones. Maybe this whole discussion also illustrates how diversified we are to address the needs of multiple different markets. And I think this is a point that I know we have discussed in several board meetings in the last few quarters. How do you feel about being caught up at the moment in a situation where, in our own neighbourhood, in our own region that we all care about, you have an active war zone. Our products work there, they do well, and they need more and more of them. RM: I’d say it’s been a long four years in terms of our involvement with Ukraine. And there’s different phases and maybe it’s a good way of talking about it. The first phase was, when the conflict started, none of this was in our business plan. We were scaling really, really well our as-a-service model. And we had requests from all over the world. We had customers from all over the world that couldn’t get enough, right? Because you found a sweet spot and you were just scaling. And when Ukraine broke out and we started getting involved very early in March, April of 2022. And the more we did, the more the systems got useful, the more we understood how we could help them, the more they wanted more systems. And this created a cycle where, in the following years, 2022, then ‘23, coming ‘24, we could get easily completely involved in Ukraine. From a business point of view that’s a risk. From an emotional point of view, that’s what we had to do. And so, what we came up with was a balance. So, I would say this was the second period. Then coming into the third period, what happened was every country in Europe saw that this is what the future looks like. And so turning to us as a company that’s deeply involved to understand how they can transform their way of working by using autonomous systems. CE: But I think they will also go into our commercial applications. RM: Of course. CE: This is just a different flywheel of sorts right now. Last question on the European landscape, or the general landscape, and it’s tied to culture. We think that in this domain right now, we’re about to enter a phase of consolidation, because some of these not 20-year-old companies that are maybe not approaching it with a long-term view, as is what we are trying to do here together. How do you view this? I know this is something new for Tekever. We’re only just preparing and getting started on that front. How do you see the importance of M&A [mergers and acquisitions] as an additional area of growth? And if I may also ask, because this requires financing and additional pools of capital, despite the fact that we have been profitable and we generate cash, it still is a new activity that requires further fundraising. What are you looking in terms of capital and capital partners to finance this activity now? Sorry for the very long-winded question. RM: I think the first thing is, and you said it, we’re building a company for the next decades. We don’t think short term. Obviously, you need to deliver short term, and you need to run a business also thinking about the short term, but we have a long-term strategy. And it’s very clear to us, when we look at the European market, that you will go through a tremendous consolidation phase in the next three-to-five years. And the companies that can grow in a healthy way organically, or through M&A, are the companies that will be in a better position to serve the market. And, in essence, that’s the purpose. It’s how do you serve your customers better? And this is a transformation that customers throughout Europe, throughout the world, are going through. And so, we need to increase our footprint, first of all, so geographically, but also the types of products that are required by customers are tremendous. We are fundamentally focused today on the aerial domain. You have challenges in the maritime domain. You have challenges in the land domain. Just on the air domain as well, open up any newspaper, you have challenges on the counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] domain. All of these are UAS challenges. All of these are autonomous challenges. CE: Autonomy is the connecting piece. RM: Autonomy is the connecting piece. And our customers, governments throughout the world, are struggling with doing this. And so, we can bring on board, on this formidable platform that we’ve been building. And if we do this correctly through the next years, we’re able to serve more customers and serve them better with more products. It’s a new capability. We’ve bought a couple of companies last year, small companies. One of them was an airport, because we needed an airport, in West Wales, but we will do a lot more M&A this year. And, coming to your second question, what types of partners do we need on board? We need partners like Baillie Gifford. When we first partnered and Baillie Gifford led our Series B [funding round], when we first met, I think that the tremendous impression I had – and I had taken meetings with lots and lots of different types of companies in the investment world, venture capital, private equity, and because we were bootstrapped for so long, I didn’t really know the differences, right? And what became really, really evident was that we had found an organisation working in a different market, an investment market, in the capital market, that thought like us. And that was like, ‘wow, this exists’. We didn’t know. We’re here to build a company that can work directly with governments. So that’s by definition a prime company, but for this world, for the autonomy world. And that’s really difficult to do. And it takes long-term thinking. If you’re optimising for the short term, you’ve lost already. And so that’s the type of investor we want is people that understand what we’re trying to do, that have enough capital to support what we need to do, which is tremendous organic growth and growth through M&A. And again, Tekever is a profitable company, and we’ve been so for a long time. But to grow at the speed we can grow, and we need to grow to serve our customers, we need investors that think like Baillie Gifford. CE: Right. Thank you, Ricardo. I think this has been a great discussion and we could go on for actually quite a while, but we’re about to do something really interesting. We’re about to head to the Highlands to Fonab Castle, where you’re going to be surrounded by about 30 or 35 of your peers, other co-founders and CEOs from are both private and public portfolio companies of Baillie Gifford. We will lock you into the castle and go away! But are you looking forward to spending time with your peers? RM: I think it’s a tremendous opportunity. CE: Learn from each other. RM: Exactly. CE: The topic is building a business and you have a lot to contribute, but there’s always a learning component to it. RM: So much to learn. One of the things that I’m really looking forward is learning from other founders and other CEOs that have taken companies public, for example. And that is a journey we will be on very likely and we are already preparing for it. But how is it, and hear it in a closed room with intimacy on the real difficulties. We will never be fully prepared until we do it, right? And I know that we have the culture to pull it off successfully, but learning from other people’s mistakes, for example, not only the very positive and nice and pink stories, but all the challenging problems, all the sleepless nights, that’s what I want to hear. And I think you can only do that in a very closed, safe, protected environment. And I think Baillie Gifford giving us the opportunity to be here is fantastic. CE: Thank you, Ricardo. RM: Thank you.   <h3>Glossary</h3> M&A - Mergers and acquisitions   <h3>Risk Factors</h3> The views expressed should not be considered as advice or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a particular investment. They reflect opinion and should not be taken as statements of fact nor should any reliance be placed on them when making investment decisions. This communication was produced and approved in May 2026 and has not been updated subsequently. It represents views held at the time of writing and may not reflect current thinking. Potential for Profit and Loss All investment strategies have the potential for profit and loss, your or your clients’ capital may be at risk. Past performance is not a guide to future returns. This communication contains information on investments which does not constitute independent research. Accordingly, it is not subject to the protections afforded to independent research, but is classified as advertising under Art 68 of the Financial Services Act (‘FinSA’) and Baillie Gifford and its staff may have dealt in the investments concerned. All information is sourced from Baillie Gifford & Co and is current unless otherwise stated. The images used in this communication are for illustrative purposes only.

Watch short highlights from our full conversation with Tekever co-founder Ricardo Mendes here.

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