AirHub Raises €4.4 Million to Expand Drone Operations Software Into Defence and Security

The same software running live drone missions for Dubai Police and the Belgian Federal Police just secured €4.4 million to build purpose-built tools for defence and counter-drone security, an investment that accelerates what is already a software arms race in low-altitude operations.

AirHub, the Dutch company founded in 2016 by co-CEOs Thomas Brinkman and Stephan van Vuren, both commercial airline pilots turned drone operators, closed its Series A on April 8 with backing from Keen Venture Partners, Runway FBU, Lumaux and LUMO Labs. The round is more than four times the size of the company's €1 million seed, completed in April 2024, meaning AirHub has compacted nearly a decade of self-funded development into a two-year sprint toward institutional scale. The capital funds international team expansion and two new product lines: MilHub, targeting defence-related operational environments, and SecHub, which adds a counter-drone proposition covering detection, management and threat response.

"This funding helps us accelerate AirHub's growth as a European software company serving organisations that operate in high-stakes environments," said co-CEO Brinkman. The framing is pointed: AirHub is positioning its Drone Operations Center as sovereign European infrastructure at a moment when governments are scrutinising the origin of mission-critical software.

For competitive drone racing, the implications are direct. AirHub's core platform handles four things race directors currently cobble together from mismatched tools: live telemetry monitoring, mission workflow with permission-layer compliance, incident logging tied to video timestamps, and unified reporting. Today, most race operations stacks are a fragmented mix of manual pilot check-ins, frequency coordination sheets, basic FPV goggle feeds and post-event logs assembled from memory. AirHub's approach, already field-tested across nine enterprise and government clients including Shell, Dutch Customs and Boskalis, integrates all of those layers into a single dashboard.

SecHub is the piece with the most direct relevance to large-scale racing. As FPV moves from warehouse circuits into stadiums and urban festival zones, event operators face the same counter-UAS requirements being imposed on high-value venues everywhere: who is in the airspace, which drone is authorised, and what happens when an unidentified aircraft enters the geofence. SecHub is built to answer those questions in real time. The toolset AirHub is developing for Belgian Federal Police deployments is directly transferable to a stadium race with sponsor-grade liability requirements.

The contrast with current race-ops practice is sharp. Remote ID compliance, mandatory in most major racing jurisdictions, is typically treated as a standalone checkbox rather than a live operational feed. Sponsor-grade telemetry documentation, the kind that underpins naming-rights negotiations, is rarely standardised. Incident logging, essential for both post-race safety review and insurance claims, usually happens after the fact.

Keen Venture Partners brings defence and dual-use technology expertise to the round, while Runway FBU, backed by Norway's Aker Group, adds infrastructure credibility. Whether €4.4 million is sufficient to own this category outright is a legitimate question: UTM providers, fleet management platforms and counter-UAS specialists are all converging on the same event-day use cases. But AirHub's operational track record with Dubai Police, the Portuguese Bombeiros and the Belgian Federal Police gives Brinkman and van Vuren something most competitors lack: a verified proof-of-concept in genuinely high-stakes environments before the broader racing and events market figures out it needs exactly this.