Fotokite: EIC Accelerator Grant for Fire Drones and What Followed

Most drones used by fire brigades run on batteries for 20 to 30 minutes and need a trained pilot. Fotokite's does neither: it is tied to the fire truck by a cable that carries power and data, takes off at the push of a button and can hover above an incident for as long as the crew needs it. The company behind it, a Zurich spin-off of ETH Zurich, was registered as Perspective Robotics AG and renamed itself after its product in 2023. In June 2019 the EU selected its project, also called Fotokite, in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of what became the EIC Accelerator, and contributed €2,499,999 towards making the vehicle-integrated system ready for volume production, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later the company is still selling the same product. In April 2026 it said it had passed 1,000 units deployed worldwide across public safety, enterprise and defence. In between it raised a CHF 13.7 million Series B in 2022 and about CHF 10 million in 2024, changed chief executive twice and, according to the Swiss commercial register, converted CHF 14.7 million of claims against the company into shares.

Two Names, One Product

The European Commission's list of Phase 2 winners for the 5 June 2019 cut-off names the beneficiary as Perspective Robotics AG of Zurich, with the website fotokite.com and the project title "Aerial Situational Awareness for Every Firefighter". It is the only company listed for the project. On 8 May 2023 the shareholders changed the company name to Fotokite AG, as published in the Swiss commercial register, which also records an earlier name, Perspective Robotics GmbH. The address, Heinrichstrasse 235 in Zurich, is the same on the CORDIS fact sheet and on the company's website today.

The company is active. Besides the April 2026 milestone, it announced a partnership with the Colorado ground-robot maker Stridar in July 2026, reported by sUAS News, and the register published board changes as recently as 10 September 2026. Its news page lists a collaboration with the British defence start-up AeriaOne announced at the Milipol security fair in Paris in November 2025. The pitch has widened from firefighters to police and military users, but the product is still the tethered drone the EIC funded.

How a Drone on a Leash Works

The company's founder, Sergei Lupashin, came out of ETH Zurich's drone research. Fotokite's first commercial form was a consumer camera drone: the Fotokite Phi, a $349 quadcopter for a GoPro that flew on a retractable leash, launched on Indiegogo in August 2015, as TechCrunch reported at the time. Lupashin said the idea came from watching the 2011 election protests in Russia, where camera drones filmed scenes that reporters on the ground could not. Startupticker described it as a flying camera for journalists.

The public safety version, Fotokite Sigma, keeps the leash and drops the battery limit. The tether delivers power from the vehicle and carries the video down, and the company says the drone needs no GPS and no pilot. "No piloting, GPS, or computer vision is necessary," Chris McCall told Tech.eu in 2024. The company's website lists 24 or more hours of flight, a maximum height of 45 metres, wide, zoom and thermal cameras, and says the system is exempt from the US Federal Aviation Administration's Part 107 pilot rules. In April 2019 Fotokite launched Sigma in the US with Pierce Manufacturing, a fire truck maker owned by Oshkosh, after the FAA granted it a special flight authorisation, Startupticker reported.

Fotokite is not the only maker of tethered drones. Market data firm CB Insights compares it with Elistair and Hoverfly Technologies, two other makers of tethered drones. What Fotokite has emphasised is integration into the vehicle itself, which is what the EIC project paid for.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Perspective Robotics first took a €50,000 Phase 1 grant, FOTOKITE-SME-P1, for a four-month feasibility study from February to May 2019. Its report says new systems had been installed in fire engines, command vehicles and fire chiefs' SUVs that year. The Phase 2 grant agreement was signed on 9 October 2019, and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2021. Its stated aim was to "develop scaled-up manufacturing processes and significantly accelerate market introduction". The total cost was €6,089,375, far above the €2.5 million EU cap, so the company paid €3,589,376 itself.

The final periodic report describes three enclosures for the drone. A mobile carrying case and a side-mounted pull-out tray were finalised "for turn-key manufacture". The third, a box on the vehicle roof, reached technology readiness level 7 within the first 12 months, with prototypes on fire vehicles used in real responses, and ended the project with "a detailed assembly manual and manufacturing protocol suitable for larger scale production". The hand-over to an external contract manufacturer is described in the future tense. The report also lists market surveys in ten European countries and more than 25 demonstration events.

1. Carrying case and pull-out tray ready for manufactureDeliveredFinalised in the project; the Transport Case is on sale on fotokite.com.
2. Roof-mounted enclosure ready for productionDeliveredManufacturing protocol at project end; the Rooftop Box is now the flagship configuration.
3. Transfer to a contract manufacturerNot verifiedStill pending at project end; Swisscanto says production is in Hombrechtikon, canton Zurich, without naming who builds it.
4. Faster market introduction in EuropeDeliveredSigma in 17 European countries by January 2022, per the company.

The project closed on schedule and the product it was meant to industrialise is on the market, so the award counts as delivered. The caveat is that most of the evidence for sales comes from the company: CORDIS published no results data beyond the report, and no independent source counts the units.

The Money Since the Grant

On 19 January 2022 Fotokite announced a CHF 13.7 million Series B led by MSA Safety, a safety equipment company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with Swisscanto Invest, Credit Suisse Entrepreneur Capital and the Sony Innovation Fund. The two companies had signed a joint development agreement in July 2021. The same release made the chief financial officer, Bart Slager, chief executive, moved Chris McCall, who had been introduced as CEO in a DroneTalks interview in October 2020, to corporate development in California, and moved Lupashin to the role of chairman. Talent4Boards reported the same figures. The register shows Lupashin left the board in the entry published on 16 August 2022.

In April 2024 Fotokite raised about CHF 10 million, or $11 million, in a round led by the private equity firm Carbyne Equity Partners with Swisscanto and Credit Suisse Entrepreneur Capital, according to Dronelife and Swisscanto. Tech.eu put total funding at more than $26 million in July 2024. Slager was still chief executive at that round, but by April 2026 McCall was again named as CEO in the company's own release, and the register has listed him as chairman of the board since June 2026. No announcement of the second leadership change could be found.

The commercial register adds a detail the press releases leave out. In four capital increases, in December 2018, July 2021, December 2023 and April 2025, claims against the company totalling CHF 14,716,915.40 were set off against new preferred shares. The largest, CHF 6,220,049.60 in April 2025, came a year after the Carbyne round, and the register does not say who held the claims. Converting debt into equity is common in venture-backed companies, but it means part of the capital that shows up in the share register arrived first as loans.

Why Europe Should Care

The European Commission's Drone Strategy 2.0, adopted on 29 November 2022, names emergency services among the drone uses it expects to become part of European life by 2030, and estimates that the drone services market in Europe could be worth €14.5 billion and create 145,000 jobs by then, as Polis summarised. A European maker of drones that crews can use without pilots fits that aim, and the shift towards police and defence customers since 2025 ties the company to Europe's growing security spending too.

The firm's biggest market push, though, has been in the US. Its website names the Los Angeles Fire Department, the New York Police Department, the Chicago Fire Department and the Paris Fire Brigade among its users, its strategic investor is American, and the register gave its chief executive's residence as Sacramento, California, until July 2026. A European grant helped build a product that sells on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Verdict

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