DroneShield cut the ribbon on its Amsterdam headquarters on March 30, and two men holding scissors told you everything about where European defence money is flowing. Dutch State Secretary for Defence Derk Boswijk showed up. So did Australian Ambassador to the Netherlands Greg French. Their governments are not alone: Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states are all moving money into counter-drone systems, and the people in this room are the ones writing the purchase orders.
The Australia-based DroneShield has been selling into Europe through resellers for years. The Amsterdam hub, led by Chief Commercial Officer Louis Gamarra, is its first permanent in-region presence. About a dozen staff covering English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Scandinavian languages. The pitch to European defence ministries is simple: sovereign capability, local support, no middleman.
The demand is not theoretical. Europe generated $98 million for DroneShield in 2025, accounting for roughly 45 percent of its total annual revenue of $216.5 million, according to PrimaryIgnition. As of February 2026, the company's regional sales pipeline stood at $1.2 billion, per DroneShield's press release.
That pipeline sits against a backdrop of historic European defence spending. The EU's ReArm Europe / Readiness 2030 initiative is mobilising more than €800 billion ($919 billion) across member states, per The Defense Post. The immediate pressure is closer to the front line. Russia launched nearly 19,000 attack drones during the winter of 2025-2026, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which cited Ukrainian government data. European procurement officers are not waiting for the threat to arrive closer to home.
Manufacturing is the other constraint the Amsterdam office is meant to solve. European defence procurement rules increasingly require weapons systems to be manufactured in Europe, not just sold there. DroneShield has a European contract manufacturing partnership underway, with first deliveries of European-made counter-UAS expected by mid-2026, according to its press release. The company is targeting a ramp in annual production capacity from roughly $500 million in 2025 to $2.4 billion by the end of 2026.
DroneShield reported 2025 net profit of $3.5 million, up 367 percent year-over-year, after its first profitable year in 2023. Those are not startup curves; they are the profile of a defence contractor responding to confirmed demand from governments that have decided this problem is real.
The Amsterdam office also formalises DroneShield's EU Centre of Excellence, coordinating regulatory compliance, customer support, and operational delivery across the region. Gamarra framed it as a delivery-speed play. "Our new European headquarters will allow us to deliver faster, more localised support to our EU partners," he said in the company's press release.
The caveats are real: counter-drone procurement cycles are slow, the $1.2 billion pipeline does not become revenue until contracts are signed, and the market remains fragmented. But the men with scissors on March 30 were not there for a symbolic gesture. They were there because their governments have already decided to spend.
† Add source citation or footnote: "† Source-reported; not independently verified."
†† Add source citation or footnote: "† Source-reported; not independently verified."
††† Add source citation or footnote: "† Source-reported; not independently verified."
