Hardware + Defense: How This Drone Company Overcame the Double Fundraising Challenge

Raising capital is challenging for any startup. But when you’re building hardware for the defense industry, you’re facing what might be called the “double difficulty” of fundraising. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Guilhem de Marliave shared how his tethered drone company navigated these challenges to achieve 50% year-over-year growth.

The Double Challenge

The fundraising landscape presented two significant hurdles. As Guilhem explains, “We have two struggles during our journey of looking for fundings, it’s that we are on hardware, company building, hardware products and we are in defense.”

Finding the Right Timing

Success didn’t come immediately. “It took time, maybe more time than we originally wanted to, but the markets maturing on the drone side also and in public safety took time also. So in the end I think we had the right timing,” Guilhem shares.

Proving the Model

Rather than trying to overcome investor hesitation directly, the company focused on building proof points. Today, they have “over 1000 systems deployed” and have “built a great production, quality management and so on.”

Market Evolution as an Advantage

The company turned market maturity into an advantage. “The maturity of the drone market is now at a stage where for each application it will have a specific aircraft with different capabilities. So we are going away from the time where everyone thought that one drone would solve everything,” Guilhem explains.

This specialization helped them position the company more effectively to investors, focusing on specific, high-value use cases rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

High-Profile Validation

Major deployments provided crucial validation. “We have systems on the Super Bowl, for instance, in Atlanta. And this year or so we have been engaged also in the Football World Cup in Qatar on the Rider cup,” Guilhem notes. These implementations demonstrated both technical capability and market demand.

Key Fundraising Lessons

1. Patient Capital Alignment “Every deal we stroke on the funding side, it was difficult, it took time,” Guilhem admits. This led them to focus on finding investors who understood the longer development cycles inherent in hardware and defense.
2. Market Timing The company’s growth aligned with market maturity. As Guilhem notes, “it’s a good moment” now that they’ve established their production and quality management systems.
3. Proof Points Over Promises Instead of making future projections, they focused on demonstrating actual deployments and customer success stories.

Building for Scale

The focus has shifted from proving the concept to scaling operations. “We are around 60 people now. The pool is great. We have a lot of new products coming this year. Last year was a year of development and we kept the same range of products. And this year we have three or four new releases,” Guilhem shares.

Future Vision

The company continues to evolve, working on “developing fully autonomous tele drone boxes that can be remotely deployed on sites borders and controlled through kind of a cloud system.” This vision helps attract investors interested in the future of security technology.

For founders building hardware companies or working in regulated industries, the lesson is clear: success in fundraising often comes not from overcoming investor objections directly, but from building such compelling proof points that those objections become irrelevant.

The key is understanding that some investor concerns – like the challenges of hardware development or defense industry sales cycles – can’t be argued away. They can only be addressed through demonstrated success and strategic market positioning.