From law enforcement to firefighting to watching remote areas, the central piece of Europe’s new infrastructure is software, Daniel Nef, head of the startup Rift, explained to EU Perspectives.

The co-founder and CEO of Rift is not a defence industry veteran. He spent his earlier career scaling software products at OpenClassrooms, a French online education platform. His co-founder, Dorian Millière, was its engineering lead. Neither man came from aerospace. That, Mr Nef suggests, is precisely the point.

Rift, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Mennecy, south of Paris, raised €4.6m in a seed round in November 2025, led by AlleyCorp with participation from OVNI Capital. The company now employs about 50 people and aims to double its headcount by the end of 2026. It has exhibited at Eurosatory—where Mr Nef spoke with EU Perspectives—and SafeTech, and conducted a live-mission demonstration for French forces at Brétigny AFB in June.

The missing link

“We’re not just a drone manufacturer,” Mr Nef says. “What we do is build a new type of infrastructure.” The distinction matters to him. Rift’s system has three components: long-endurance VTOL drones with more than five hours of flight time and a 300-kilometre range, autonomous ground stations that host, recharge, and redeploy up to three drones, and RiftOS, a centralised software platform that controls the entire network from a single location.

“Our mission is to transform the way emergencies are handled today by delivering real-time aerial intelligence,” Mr Nef says. He describes Rift as the “missing link between satellites and ground teams.” Satellites provide intermittent coverage. Helicopters and aircraft are costly and slow to deploy. “That’s why we created Rift,” he says, “to actually answer that need for real-time aerial intelligence in the most critical moments.”

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The use cases are varied: wildfire detection, border surveillance, pipeline and railway inspection, coastal monitoring. What they share is scale. “The common point is really long range, vast areas that are today completely blind,” Mr Nef says. The central piece, he explains, is software. From Rift’s base south of Paris, operators can take control of every station deployed across France and Europe, and direct a fleet of drones conducting simultaneous or separate missions across entire territories.

The company has also moved into interception. Its VTOL drones can now carry interceptor drones. “With our VTOL drone, we can actually carry interceptor drones that allow us to intercept threats as far as possible from any border, military sites, infrastructure, or the civilian population,” Mr Nef says. “Really the goal here is to go as far as possible.”

Selling surveillance by the hour

Rift operates two commercial models. On the defence side, it sells the technology and trains operators. In the civil market, it sells a turnkey service: hours of inspection, hours of surveillance, guaranteed kilometres of monitored territory. “We guarantee kilometres that stay monitored by Rift,” Mr Nef says. The distinction between product and service is blurring, he adds. “Armed forces are more and more inclined to go to that service model because it requires much less human footprint and it’s also cheaper to operate.”

The shift is not without precedent, he concedes, though it remains novel in Europe. “It’s coming to Europe,” Mr Nef says. “The reason why is because it’s really expensive to recruit the right people to actually operate that system, to deploy it, to buy it even. So really the best choice for them is to just hire the whole thing. You subscribe to a surveillance capability, basically.” The company’s cost thesis is that its system runs at up to ten times less than helicopter or crewed-aircraft surveillance.

Our mission is to transform the way emergencies are handled today by delivering real-time aerial intelligence. — Daniel Nef, Rift

Annual revenues currently run to “several millions,” Mr Nef says, declining to be more precise. The €4.6m seed round is expected to fund 18 to 24 months of runway. A Series A looks likely within the next 12 to 18 months.

Faster, cheaper, smaller

Manufacturing is where Rift’s software background shows most clearly. The company uses 3D-printed carbon-fibre composite to build its VTOL drones. “This process is four times faster in production, producing one drone per 24 hours, and is six times cheaper than producing traditional industrial VTOLs, which have a unit cost of €4k versus €25k,” Mr Nef says. The result is a three-day design-to-flight cycle that allows continuous iteration in real-world conditions.

“Rift vertically integrates only the airframe and proprietary software while relying on multi-sourced commercial off-the-shelf components for everything else,” Mr Nef explains. “This approach avoids R&D bloat, supply-chain friction, and CAPEX traps commonly found in aerospace.” The company plans to deploy more than 20 autonomous stations across borders and critical infrastructure, and aims to achieve full mission autonomy, from planning to data exploitation, by 2027.

One regulatory challenge looms large. Securing pan-European beyond-visual-line-of-sight authorisations under EASA’s SORA framework remains time-consuming. “These resources support two major objectives: deploying more than twenty autonomous stations across borders and critical infrastructure, and achieving full mission autonomy, from mission planning to data exploitation in 2027,” Mr Nef says. “This growth will also enable Rift to secure SAIL III/IV regulatory approvals, paving the way for EU-wide expansion.”

Financing the network

Mr Nef is pragmatic about public money. France’s France 2030 programme has provided early-stage funding and allowed Rift to begin operating on French security-force borders. “We’re lucky enough in France to have a lot of public funding from France 2030, which really finances the beginning of the journey and allows us to deploy our solution on security forces’ borders,” he says. The next step, he adds, is the European Defence Fund and the DIANA innovation challenge, which he sees as providing visibility across Europe.

We can carry interceptor drones that allow us to intercept threats as far as possible from any border, military sites, infrastructure, or civil population. — Daniel Nef

The inspection market also beckons. “The immediate adoption driver is the shift in infrastructure inspections, where ageing infrastructure and new regulations require inspection frequencies to increase dramatically from one to two times per year to potentially six to 48 times per year by 2030 for sectors like powerlines and pipelines, creating a continuous need that Rift is positioned to capture,” Mr Nef says.

Rift’s broader ambition, building Europe’s first sovereign aerial intelligence network, sits at the intersection of two forces: rising European defence spending and growing demand for infrastructure resilience. Mr Nef frames it simply. “We’re focused on building Europe’s first sovereign aerial intelligence network dedicated to public safety and critical infrastructure,” he says. Whether a 50-person startup from the south of Paris can deliver that network is the question the next funding round will begin to answer.