An ex-Apple engineer says his new defense startup leans heavily on a key Silicon Valley strategy: 'Look at the speed that Tesla moved'

Dimitrios Kottas (Credit: Courtesy Delian Alliance Industries)

• Delian Alliance Industries, founded by former Apple engineer Dimitrios Kottas, announced Tuesday it’s raised $14 million in Series A funding to accelerate production of its affordable and autonomous defense systems. Kottas, who spent five years working in Apple’s secretive robotics lab, said he applied many learnings from his time in Silicon Valley to his four-year-old defense startup.

Dimitrios Kottas spent years at Apple working in its secretive “Special Projects Group” (SPG), working on autonomous systems for robots—and, for many years, was the team most closely associated with Project Titan, Apple’s since-canceled car project. But a few months after leaving Apple in 2021, he began work on Delian Alliance Industries, a defense startup designed “to protect Europe and its allies.”