A future drone killer Shahed is what the startup Egide is rapidly developing, created in September 2025 by two former MBDA employees, Simon Calonne and Florian Audigier. A new player who disrupts confidently and ambitiously in the anti-drone warfare and air defense market, which is becoming increasingly crowded. Despite the abundance of new players in this segment, the two young men have still managed to convince seasoned European investors (Eurazeo, Heartcore Capital, and Expeditions) to take the plunge. These funds didn’t hesitate to invest eight million euros in seed funding in Egide (launch and development of the business) on the occasion of the company’s first funding round only six months after its inception. The funding round was conducted in December and was announced this Monday. It’s already a promising first step.
With Egide, everything certainly happens quickly, the startup aims to keep pace with the rapid changes in modern conflicts. This funding round will accelerate the development of a family of electric propulsion drone interceptors, with the first in the lineup named Arges, after one of the Cyclops who forged Zeus’s thunderbolt. Nothing less than that. Egide aims to demonstrate that this drone interceptor, powered by AI (onboard and on the ground), is capable of “electrifying” a Shahed by the end of the year during a testing phase in a quasi-real environment, organized at a Battle Lab by the Defense Innovation Agency (AID). “We will be able to test the system’s complete performance,” emphasizes Simon Calonne in an exclusive interview with La Tribune.
Concretely, the eight million euros in Egide’s account will enable the recruitment of around ten people to reach a staff of 20 within the startup by the end of the year. Most importantly, they will begin production of ten Arges. This system will then “likely be industrialized on a larger scale if the state awards us a contract,” predicts Simon Calonne. In this context, the two founders plan to quickly return to seek funding from investors starting in 2027. The goal is to raise a new round of funding of 30 to 50 million euros to develop a first production capacity in Europe, in France “if possible.”
