Inside Drone Hopper's EIC Accelerator Project on Wildfire Drones

Aerial firefighting in Europe still stops when the sun goes down. Planes and helicopters return to base at night and stay grounded in thick smoke or strong wind, which is when many fires spread. Drone Hopper, a Madrid company founded in 2015, set out to fill that gap with an unmanned multirotor that could carry 600 litres of water, drop it as a fine mist close to the flames and keep flying through the night. In June 2019 the European Commission selected its WILDHOPPER project in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, and the EU agreed to pay €2,485,481.25 towards a €3,550,687.50 project.

The project closed on 30 April 2022. Its final report on CORDIS still lists the "manufacturing of a real-scale prototype" and a "fully operative prototype" as expected results rather than achievements. In October 2026 the company's website describes Drone Hopper as a provider of "Servicios de Asesoría en I+D" (R&D advisory services) and presents WILD HOPPER v1 and v2 as concept studies.

What Drone Hopper Does Now

Drone Hopper SL is an active company. It moved its registered office from the Leganés business incubator to Calle Mahón 8 in Las Rozas de Madrid in April 2024, and changed its financial year to end on 31 October, according to the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME) and the register summaries on DatosCif and Empresia. Its last filed accounts are for 2023. Empresia puts its annual turnover between €1,000,000 and €2,500,000 and its staff at 2; the filed accounts themselves could not be read for free, so whether that turnover includes EU grant income could not be verified. A University Carlos III of Madrid incubator profile, which carries no date, describes a team of 27 employees.

What it offers has changed. The website now sells R&D advice for autonomous missions, beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights, sensor integration and cost reduction. It lists four research projects: WILDHOPPER, the EU's FASTER emergency response project, and two projects funded by Spain's innovation agency CDTI, EXTINCIA (small electric drones guided by artificial intelligence to put out small forest fires, 2024 to 2025) and ULTRADRON (drone logistics). The project page of ITG, an EXTINCIA collaborator, confirms Drone Hopper as a consortium member under coordinator CLUE. The heavy platforms appear only as "Concept Study": WILD HOPPER v1 and v2, CRANE HOPPER and QUAD HOPPER. A smaller FAN-HOPPER demonstrator, built to validate the control layers for WILDHOPPER, is described as being in "pruebas de laboratorio previas a los primeros vuelos", laboratory tests before its first flights.

That is a pivot. The company that won EU money to build and sell a heavy firefighting drone now presents engineering services as its business and the drone as a study.

The Technology: Fuel, Not Batteries

Most firefighting drones in service watch fires; they do not fight them. Battery-powered multirotors lack the lifting power to carry useful amounts of water, which the CORDIS objective of WILDHOPPER names as the limitation it wanted to overcome. Drone Hopper's answer was a large multirotor with combustion engines, ducted fans and a patented release system that turns water into a mist and mixes it with the airflow of the rotors, which the company says smothers flames by removing oxygen. The 2017 feasibility study it ran with €50,000 from the SME Instrument Phase 1 describes this patented mechanism, and North Data lists a 2016 patent for a "non-manned vehicle for extinguishing fires".

The sales case rested on cost and night flying. Regional authorities "can't buy a $30 million airplane, but can have this platform", Pablo Flores told the EU's Horizon magazine in March 2018, as republished by Robohub; he said the drone would cost five times less per litre than water tanker aircraft and was meant to complement planes and helicopters, not replace them. The 2022 paper on the design in Heliyon, written by Flores with researchers from Universidad Carlos III and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, compares the drone with helicopters that cost at least €2.5 million to buy and more than €4,000 an hour to fly.

The payload claims moved over time. In May 2017 a company press release carried by JEMS described a petrol-powered drone with a 300-litre tank, demonstrations of a fully working prototype from July 2017 and a market launch in autumn 2018. The Phase 1 report on CORDIS spoke of "2 full-size prototypes" and four planned lines, from the 60-litre AGRO HOPPER to a 300-litre WILD HOPPER. By 2019 the WILD HOPPER target was 600 litres. The starting point is given differently in two EU records: the WILDHOPPER report says the aim was to raise the payload "from 80L to 600L", while the company's HOPPERSUP project, which paid €95,625 for a UAV engineer from October 2020 to March 2022, says from 150 to 600 litres. No launch of a firefighting drone of any size has been announced.

What WILDHOPPER Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of winners of the 5 June 2019 cut-off names Drone Hopper SL of Madrid as the only beneficiary of WILDHOPPER. The grant agreement was signed on 29 October 2019, and the project ran for 30 months from 1 November 2019 to 30 April 2022, ending on its planned date. The EU paid 70% of the cost; Drone Hopper had to find the remaining €1,065,206.25. The EU's Climate-ADAPT platform also lists the project.

The final periodic report sets out five technical objectives: raise the payload to 600 litres, characterise the water release with ecological retardants, adapt the mission control system for autonomous navigation, manufacture a real-scale prototype and validate it in an operational environment. The work it reports is mostly groundwork: in-house design tools, simulations, a ducted fan test bench that was "currently being tested" to design the water ejection system, flight tests of "key enabler prototypes", a regulatory dossier, extended patents, suppliers selected, sales staff hired and four research papers. It does not report a 600-litre flight, a finished full-scale prototype or a test in an operational environment.

1. Payload raised to 600 litresNot achievedNo 600-litre flight reported by CORDIS or the company; the 2026 website lists WILD HOPPER as a concept study.
2. Water release with ecological retardantsPartlyMulti-fluid simulations done; the injector test bench was still being tested in the final report.
3. Autonomous mission controlPartlyAutomatic mission management flown on smaller prototypes and published in papers; not shown on the full platform.
4. Real-scale prototype manufacturedNot achievedListed as an "expected result" in the closing report; none shown publicly since.
5. Validation in an operational environmentNot achievedNo fire service trial or customer announced.

The papers are real. Besides the Heliyon article, the report cites work on a WILD HOPPER prototype for forest firefighting and on system integration in the International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering. The Heliyon paper, published on 31 May 2022, a month after the project ended, presents WILD HOPPER as a proposed solution and backs its control design with simulations; it names the 60 to 80-litre AGRO HOPPER and 150-litre URBAN HOPPER as the platforms the company had built. The report itself also mentions a "pivot of the original business model" to heavy installation, logistics, agriculture and air mobility as a possible impact.

What Drone Hopper Has Achieved Since the Award

Drone Hopper has been good at winning EU research money. Besides its two own Horizon 2020 grants and HOPPERSUP, CORDIS lists it as a partner in FASTER, a €7.3 million first-responder technology project that ran from May 2019 to April 2022, with €257,500 for Drone Hopper; in TREEADS, a wildfire management project coordinated by RISE Fire Research in Norway, where its participation ended after €13,244.04; and in E-SPFdigit, a Horizon Europe project from October 2024 to September 2027 on on-site soil and crop contamination sensing, which includes a heavy-duty drone, with €172,725. The same six grants appear on North Data.

Private money is harder to find. No equity round, venture investor or customer contract could be found in news searches, and CB Insights lists the 2019 EIC grant as the company's latest funding. The company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which was checked page by page; its 2019 award was grant only. The register shows a change of owner in July 2021, when A Barxiela Investments SL, a holding company set up that June with Pablo Flores Peña as sole director, became Drone Hopper's sole shareholder, according to the BORME of 4 August 2021 and Empresia. Whether any outside shareholder ever invested could not be verified.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU is spending heavily on aerial firefighting. In August 2024 the Commission launched production of a permanent rescEU fleet of 12 amphibious firefighting planes, paid with €600 million of EU funds and hosted by six member states including Spain, with the first planes due at the end of 2027, according to the European Commission, whose civil protection commissioner called wildfire seasons "longer, deadly and more unpredictable". The production agreements were signed with the Canadian Commercial Corporation, so the EU's own fleet depends on a supplier outside Europe. The Commission's Drone Strategy 2.0 of November 2022 sets out to build a large-scale European drone services market, including public safety and emergency uses.

A European heavy-lift drone that could attack fires at night would fit both policies. Drone Hopper's work in EXTINCIA, on small electric drones coordinated with manned aircraft, keeps it in the field, but on a different and smaller technology than the one the EIC paid for.

The Verdict

Drone Hopper has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.