Srdjan Kovacevic, CEO & Co-Founder of Orqa: Building leading drone hardware in Europe
Scaling EuropeShow Notes
Orqa is a Croatian company that designs and manufactures drones, components and ground stations entirely in Europe, a rare setup in an industry that mostly relies on China. Orqa now builds primarily for defence customers across NATO and the West, and shipped 250,000 products last year, a number it's on track to double in 2026.
Srdjan Kovacevic is CEO and Co-Founder of Orqa. He believes most Western militaries aren't ready for drone warfare yet, and that needs to change fast.
The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel. Check them out here: https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk
Sponsors:
Chargebee: https://www.chargebee.com/events/beelieve/london/2026
SurrealDB: https://surrealdb.com/
Lovable: https://lovable.dev/
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction 0:15 - What Orqa builds 1:07 - Why Orqa set out to build Europe's answer to Chinese drone brands 2:36 - Why Orqa builds everything in Europe 5:03 - Orqa's current production scale 6:41 - How the war in Ukraine pulled Orqa into defence 8:05 - Why Orqa builds for NATO's future needs, not Ukraine's immediate ones 10:19 - Orqa's production numbers: 250,000 products shipped last year 13:16 - Orqa's biggest supply chain bottleneck 15:40 - Why the AI boom is causing a new chip shortage for Orqa 19:10 - Ukraine's drone warfare numbers 20:36 - How drone warfare has transformed the battlefield
More from Scaling Europe
Wiz keeps the cloud systems of thousands of companies safe, and it has kept running as its own business since Google bought it earlier this year. It just launched Scan for Good, which uses its AI agents to find weak spots in critical services like hospitals and national archives before anyone can exploit them.
Masia just closed its first fund at €18m, backed by more than 70 founders, tech leaders and investors from Barcelona. It invests in startups with ties to the city at the very earliest stage, and connects them with some of the best funds from around the world.
It’s easy to start selling online today, but growing an e-commerce brand into a much bigger business is still really hard. ZyG takes over the work of scaling for brands with great products, and its AI agents run everything from marketing to customer support.
Attio just launched a new version of its CRM built for a world where AI agents do more and more of the work. Attio now handles 1.6 billion API calls a month, with usage growing 50% every month.
Singular is a Paris and London based venture firm backing some of Europe's most exciting early stage companies, from Basecamp Research to Aikido.