It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Kelluu’s airships on the radar of Nato and conspiracists alike

If you were to look up at the Finnish firmament over Joensuu and see a large, shiny silver object floating silently through the air, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve seen a UFO. Though it looks like a product of extraterrestrial fabrication, it is simply an airship developed by Finland-based company Kelluu to gather high-resolution data over vast areas. Measuring 12 metres in length, these high flyers hark back to the Zeppelins of the early-20th century, though they combine the precision of drones with the scale of satellites.

Hydrogen-powered fuel cells keep the airships aloft for long periods of time, even in extreme cold – such as a recent trip over Lapland at minus 30C – and all while delivering scalable, high-quality data that has drawn Nato’s attention. Joensuu’s proximity to the Russian border means Kelluu regularly contends with signal jamming and spoofing. The result is a fleet designed to operate reliably even in heavily contested electronic environments.

The company was co-founded by Jiri Jormakka, who previously ran a software business and developed a deep interest in aviation. Yet it was the challenge of merging hardware, software and operational logistics that truly drew him in and led to him setting up Kelluu. Jormakka joined Monocle to discuss the company’s airborne technology and why its silent, hovering presence has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

When I hear of airships, I think of the Second World War or 20th-century blimps that soared above sporting events. Tell us a bit about how Kelluu’s airships differ from those Zeppelins of old.
Technically, the term we use is unmanned. They are like drones but they use lighter-than-air tech to stay up, and they are 12 metres long. So compared to a fixed or multi-computer drone, they’re big, but if you take an airship that was used 100 years ago, they’re small.

As hydrogen is lighter than air, what does that mean in terms of range and reliability? 
Because we use hydrogen as a lifting gas [and as a power source], we are not using any energy to stay up. We use energy only if we move or stay in one location when there’s wind. This gives us extremely long operational flight hours. We are also not using batteries as a main power source but with the hydrogen fuel cells we can do missions in extremely cold weather. 

What floats to mind are the incredible applications this would have from, say, a military or defence perspective. But I guess there are so many others, such as infrastructure or environmental monitoring. That must be one of the great selling points.
Exactly. What our tech actually can do better than others is that it enables a super-accurate digital model of the world. We are basically doing aerial photography in the same way drones do: we are close to the object ground surface, so we get really high-quality data. Unlike drones, our airships have the quality to stay up for an extremely long time and therefore provide the most accurate data.

What led you to start this company? 
I have a sports background and a business education. I had a software business earlier and I knew a bit about aviation. But in the beginning we only had the idea, so I needed to be simple and dumb enough to not know everything. If I had known how hard this would be, maybe I wouldn’t have done it.

Almost every entrepreneur that I speak to on this programme says something along the lines of ‘my naivety is a superpower’. Does naivety help because you can ask questions that a veteran of this sector wouldn’t think to ask?
That might be true. Now we have really good professionals working at Kelluu, and we’re scaling up rapidly.

Talk to me about manufacturing. Does Kelluu own the whole process from supply chain to delivery?
It’s a service. We decided to build and operate the system, collect data and process the data. It’s our turnkey solution because on the civilian side customers don’t want to buy anything that moves or is a machine, they only want the information. On the defence side, they want to buy actual things [such as hardware].

Let’s talk about Arctic security, because Finland has a very long border with Russia. This technology must be increasingly valuable in terms of monitoring. What kind of role are you playing, or hoping to play, in that space?
We are a Nato Diana Phase 2 company, so we’ve been working with Nato and defence for a few years now. As to what is happening across the border: I see it as multi-layered, in the sense that you need information from different layers including space, high altitude (aeroplanes and so on), lower altitude (drones), fixed wing and then ground layer. We are really good at low altitude – below cloud level – and Arctic conditions. That is our niche area.

You have a marketing hat as well. Do you have to go back to basics when you’re selling this product?
The best-case scenario is that I can show, not tell. We are deploying our capabilities across the EU right now and even North America. It helps that people are seeing what we can do, and seeing our data feed and how it helps the end users in different nations. I hope lighter-than-air will come back and will play its part in the big Nato picture.

Where could this technology go at a greater scale? The loads are relatively modest in terms of what these airships can carry. But what about other potential civilian deployments? Could they be a mobility solution down the track?
These are mass manufacturable and we are building more all the time. They are emission-free, a really cost-efficient way to have assets in the air and collect data worldwide. The plan is that we will build hundreds of thousands of these and it will help the whole of humankind to understand what direction Earth is going in. So far this is the best way to collect super-high-quality data from large areas.

What about integration in broader civil-aviation infrastructure? There are big narratives about drone interference around commercial aircraft operations, for example. How does Kelluu fit into and work with those existing frameworks?
Our headquarters and factories are located just next to the Russian border in Finland. So we have 24/7 free GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] timing, and that’s where we are doing all the R&D. It’s safe to say that we are GNSS resilient when we are operating. So I hope that we will be part of a nationwide aerial survey solution in which unmanned aviation and manned aviation can co-operate to provide information on different things.

The aircraft have a spaceship vibe about them. Do you hear from people thinking that they’ve seen a UFO? 
The airship floats so it’s super silent and it moves differently compared to drones or fixed-wing assets. So yes we have some UFO action happening. There’s all kinds of video footage, rumours on X and on Reddit from people who don’t know what they have seen. I’m sure that we are the most famous UFO company from Finland.

Listen to the full conversation on ‘The Entrepreneurs’. 

Read more about the airship industry.