GOVCON WEEKLY
Canadian Procurement Pulse: Your Weekly Contractor Insider
If you are receiving for your first time, welcome to the club! My name is Joe Noss, I am the CEO of Publicus, and every week we give you an inside look into procurement across the country using our AI-powered analytics.
A quick note before we dig in. We're doing something a little different this week. We're focusing on global government procurement for drones, in honour of the upcoming Best Defence Conference, the legislation to create the DIA, and popular demand from readers. We will return to your regularly scheduled programming of domestic procurement very soon, but bear with us as we drill down on defence.
The 30-Second Version
Counter-drone spending went from a rounding error to a line item: two awards in 2021, sixteen in 2025. But the trend is the obvious part. The interesting question is who gets paid, and the answer is not who the rearmament speeches imply.
The buyers on these contracts are almost all European. The winners are American, Israeli, and, increasingly, a venture-backed German startup. Across the 2015 to 2026 awards, US firms took the largest disclosed euro total we can see, around €1.1B, and Israel's Elbit owns the single biggest counter-drone contract in the data, a 2025 deal in Romania.
Nobody has agreed on how to stop a drone, so buyers are hedging across every method, from a €275M electronic-warfare suite to a case of shotguns. No incumbent has formed. That is the opportunity.
The exception is Spain. It buys the most, fields its own winners, runs a live experiment across every counter-drone method, and has already turned that home industry into an export.
One frame to hold onto: every figure here is a contract award dated 2015 to 2026, captured in our September 9, 2026 snapshot, and most of the money landed since 2023. It is the picture our data supports, broad and multi-country, but not a complete census. A market that looks quiet here may be one we hold less data on.
Follow the Euros, and Watch Them Leave
Every defence ministry in Europe is giving the same speech about building capability at home. The contracts say something more awkward.
Sort the drone and counter-drone awards by the nationality of the company that actually won them, and the top of the table is not European. Across the 2015 to 2026 awards, American vendors took roughly €1.1B of disclosed work. Arcturus, owned by AeroVironment, won Denmark's single largest drone award. Israel's Elbit took the biggest counter-drone contract in the entire set, a 2025 award worth €275M in Romania. The home team wins at home far less often than the press releases suggest.
What it means: the continent is rearming against drones, and a large share of what it is buying is foreign. For a European supplier, the gap between the rhetoric and the purchase order is the whole addressable market. For a Canadian or Australian firm, it is a map of where the incumbents are soft.
Four Companies Winning the Drone War
Four names keep showing up, each winning for a different reason.
AeroVironment, United States: the catalogue got a lot longer
It started small and light: for years, AeroVironment was known for the hand-launched Raven and the backpack-sized Switchblade loitering munition.
A $4.1B deal changed what it is: in 2025 it bought a company called BlueHalo and bolted on space, cyber, electronic warfare, and a counter-drone laser.
Now it sells the whole kill chain: the drone that finds the target, the loitering munition that hits it, and the laser that shoots the other side's drones down.
The net effect: when a European ministry buys "a drone," it is increasingly buying one line of an American catalogue that now runs all the way to directed energy.
Elbit Systems, Israel: the quiet giant
Nearly $8B a year, mostly foreign: almost three-quarters of its order book sits outside Israel.
ReDrone is the counter-drone product: it detects and defeats several drones at once.
It sells to Europe anonymously: the press releases name the money but not the customer, "a €60M contract with an unnamed NATO European country," a €55M deal with the Netherlands. Buying Israeli kit is politically awkward in parts of Europe, so buyers leave the nameplate off and buy it anyway, because it is combat-proven against exactly the threats they now fear.
It owns the high end: the single biggest counter-drone cheque in our data, Romania's €275M in 2025, is Elbit's.
Quantum-Systems, Germany: the startup beating the primes
European, and winning: founded near Munich about a decade ago, it makes the Vector, a small vertical-takeoff reconnaissance drone.
Its valuation keeps multiplying: from roughly €1B in 2024 to about €3B in 2025, then a $1.2B round in July 2026 that valued it near $8B, backed by Blackstone, Airbus, and Advent.
It wins across borders: a default supplier to the German military, and a winner in Romania and Spain.
The move primes cannot copy: it does not just sell into Ukraine, it invests in Ukrainian drone factories, turning the fastest battlefield feedback loop on earth into its own product pipeline.
Shield AI, United States: it sells the pilot, not the plane
The product is software: Hivemind, autonomy that flies the drone when there is no human and no GPS, wrapped around a jet-ducted aircraft called the V-BAT.
Navies are buying for one reason: it keeps flying when the GPS and radio links are jammed, which is now the normal condition of a battlefield. The Netherlands put twelve to sea; Romania and Poland followed.
The valuation prices in the bet: reports put it around $12B, a number that only makes sense if the pilot, not the airframe, is the product.
The direction of travel: as jamming becomes standard, autonomy stops being a feature and becomes the whole point.
Notice what three of the four have in common: they are not really drone companies anymore. They are autonomy, electronic-warfare, and kill-chain companies that happen to fly. That is the clue to where a newcomer should actually aim, and it is not the drone.
Where the Door Is Still Open
The reason the field is not sewn up is that nobody has agreed on how to actually stop a drone, so buyers are purchasing a bit of everything.
For a single threat, a cheap enemy quadcopter, buyers are writing cheques that range from €275M down to under €1M. That is not indecision, it is hedging, and it is the tell that this market has no standard and no king yet.
What it means: on the drone platforms, you are mostly bidding to be a supplier inside somebody else's product. On the counter-drone side, you can still win the category outright, because the category does not exist yet. That is the rarest and most valuable thing in defence, a market before its incumbent.
Spotlight: What Spain Is Actually Buying
We keep calling Spain the exception. Here is what that looks like in the actual contracts.
The drones: big money, mostly kept at home
The marquee buy: a 2025 award of €364M for 49 medium-range Tarsis RPAS, the single largest drone contract in our data. It went to Aertec's defence unit, now owned by Spain's Indra, which is folding the national drone industry into one prime.
A home-grown fleet underneath it: a run of smaller buys from Spanish makers like A. Paukner and ETRA AIR fills out the roster.
The one foreign name that keeps cracking in: Germany's Quantum-Systems wins mini-drone orders from the Spanish Army, the exception that shows how closed the rest of the list is.
The counter-drones: small money, every method at once
A rounding error that matters: just €44M across 24 separate contracts since 2023, tiny next to the drones, yet the richest counter-drone shopping list anywhere in the dataset.
No single bet: Spain is not wagering on which way to stop a drone. It is buying every answer at once.
Detect it and take it over: a €30M set of counter-drone systems for deployed operations, radio-frequency kit that hijacks a drone's control link and flies it home, and portable jammers for the Guardia Civil.
Or just shoot it down, every flavour: single-use interceptor drones, a tube-launched counter-drone micro-missile still at the research stage, a hard-kill gun turret, and 76 millimetre ammunition so warships can knock drones out of the sky.
And, at the bottom of the budget: counter-drone shotguns from Beretta's Spanish arm. Detection, jamming, hijacking, interception, missiles, naval guns, and buckshot.
The common thread: almost every one of those contracts went to a Spanish company.
Why it works
A live national experiment: while most countries wait to see which counter-drone technology wins, Spain is funding a nationwide test across all of them, and running it through its own industry.
The payoff is an industry, not an import bill: that is why Sener, a Spanish firm, could turn around and win Sweden's target-drone programme, worth about €315M.
The playbook in one line: buy everything at home, learn what works, then export the winners. Everyone else gives the speech. Spain is the only one running the play.
Your Takeaways
If you sell drones or counter-drones:
Chase the counter-drone side, not the platform. The drone market is consolidating around a few mostly-American primes. The counter-drone market has no incumbent, no standard, and buyers hedging across eight different kill methods. That is where a focused firm can still be first, not third.
Sell what survives a jammer. The single clearest signal in the vendor data is that the premium is moving to autonomy and electronic warfare, the things that still work when the GPS is gone. If your pitch assumes a clean spectrum, it is already dated.
Read the anonymity. When a contract names a sum but not a supplier, that is usually a political buy, which means the door is open to a vendor the customer can name proudly. That is an opening, if you are the one it can.
If you are a government that keeps saying "build at home":
Spain is the working template. Concentrate demand across every service, back a handful of national firms, let them experiment on the cheap end, and give them a home market big enough to export from. The result is Sener winning in Sweden rather than another import line.
Our Take
The uncomfortable pattern under all of this is that the defence industry sold the world a decade of drones and is now selling the world the cure, and the companies on both sides of that trade are mostly the same, and mostly not European. Europe is writing the cheques. America, Israel, and a handful of new-model startups are cashing them.
The one government that looks different is the one treating drone defence as an industrial project rather than a shopping list. That is the real lesson here for Canada, Australia, and everyone else with the same ambition. The window to build a domestic industry is open precisely because the technology has not settled, and it will not stay open once it does.
How We Counted
Awards were drawn from Publicus DefenceBase, covering certified award notices from European portals, Canada, and Australia. The largest drone euro figures are framework ceilings, not executed spend. United States awards are excluded from every dollar figure, used only as a count-based presence signal. Company profiles draw on public filings and reporting from 2024 to 2026; some valuations are press estimates, which we have flagged as estimates rather than facts.
And the caveat that matters most: this is the data we have seen, not everything that exists. No single source captures every drone award ever reported, so a market that looks small here may be one we hold less of, not one that buys less. Read it as the picture the data supports, not a final ranking.
GovCon Weekly is written by the team at Publicus. We built the AI agent system that helps businesses find and win Canadian government contracts, and enables governments to save money, buy Canadian, and manage vendor performance. If you want to see opportunities like these before your competitors do, subscribe, or reach out for a demo.
