Europe's $250M/year cruise missile factory
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: Destinus is building a business on both sides of the drone war, selling cruise missiles for long-range attacks & cheaper interceptors for shooting down incoming drones without exhausting expensive air-defense missiles. Sacra estimates Destinus’s revenue hit $250M in 2025, up 257% year-over-year. For more, check out our updated report and dataset on Destinus.
We first covered Destinus in May 2025 at $70M in annual revenue as it financed its hypersonic aircraft ambitions by selling drones to Ukraine, positioning itself to benefit from Europe’s rearmament.
Key points via Sacra AI:
- Originally with the ambition to build the first hydrogen-powered hypersonic aircraft, Destinus was able to commercialize and scale to $70M/year by 2025 building & selling drones into Ukraine, but the market in Ukraine has become saturated & ultra-competitive, with 500+ domestic manufacturers using cheap Chinese parts and a focus on producing ~$300 kamikaze drones rather than Destinus’s ~$25K long-range drones.
- As cheap attack drones have become the new weapon of choice for guerilla warfare, Destinus now sells counter-drone technology into NATO countries that need to defend their bases, ships, and power grids, launching the Hornet (August 2026) as a ~$50K interceptor drone that allows militaries to take out incoming drones without expending their existing $1.5M to $2M air-defense missiles.
- With Germany & 11 other European countries spending $50B on long-range strike capabilities over the next decade to both deter Russia & decouple from the U.S, Destinus has leveraged its existing proprietary turbojet engines to build a line of cruise missiles with a range of 700km that sell for ~$400K each, or about one-tenth the cost of a US Tomahawk (shipments facing delays up to 5 years due to stockpiles being depleted by the Iran War) and one-sixth the cost of a missile from European missile giant MBDA which won’t have its next-generation missiles ready until 2030.
- With sales of its Ruta cruise missile (October 2025) driving 30% of 2025 revenue & 80% of its projected 2026 revenue, and production ramping to ~300 units per month (October 2026) or more cruise missiles than all of Europe produced in a year before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Sacra estimates Destinus generated $250M in 2025 revenue, up 257% year-over-year from $70M in 2024, with ~$560M forecast for 2026, in talks to raise at a $6.7B valuation for a 12x multiple on 2026 revenue.
- Destinus, Quantum Systems ($330M in 2025 revenue, +161% YoY) and & Helsing ($18B valuation) are racing to build European neoprimes, expanding from individual drones into broader weapons, autonomy & defense systems to win contracts historically dominated by incumbents like Rheinmetall (~$11.1B in 2025 revenue, +29% YoY), much like Anduril ($2.2B in 2025 revenue, +120% YoY) & Shield AI ($300M revenue in March 2025, +64% YoY in 2024) are doing in the United States.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Destinus (dataset)
- Quantum Systems (dataset)
- Claude Code for drone warfare
- Helsing
- Anduril (dataset)
- Shield AI (dataset)
- Stark Defence
- Destinus at $70M/year
- Quantum Systems at $330M/year up 161% YoY
- Ukrainian Dynamism
- ICEYE at $283M/year up 116% YoY
- $22M/year DJI of Estonia
- America First vs. American Dynamism
- Anduril at $1B/yr
