Croatian FPV maker Orqa and Canadian defence firm Remote Robotic Systems signed a five-year, 150 million CAD partnership on June 25, 2026 in Toronto to build drones, artificial intelligence and counter-unmanned aircraft systems on Canadian soil.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic stood in the room while Orqa co-founder Ivan Jelusic and RRS chief executive Kevin Toderel signed the agreement. Two heads of state as witnesses is the diplomatic version of a spotlight.
The number is real but the pace is more telling. The partners are targeting 1,000 systems per month by mid-2027 and 10,000 per month by 2029, with 100 jobs in Canada by the fourth quarter of 2027. That is a step from national credibility toward serial output.
Orqa Ships FPV Systems Into 50 Markets And Ranks In The FT1000
Orqa d.o.o. is based in Croatia and ships components and complete FPV and unmanned aerial systems into more than 50 markets. The Financial Times FT1000 list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies ranked it 135th overall and second in Aerospace and Defense last year, which puts it in a very small club of European drone makers scaling on real orders rather than pitch decks.
Remote Robotic Systems runs facilities in Ottawa and Mississauga and will host the Canadian production line, with additional expansion planned in Toronto. The company gets an Orqa product catalogue that includes the Wingman Co-Pilot AI assistant and the Arctic Falcon platform, and an initial 20 million CAD investment inside the wider 150 million CAD framework.
Croatia is small, but its FPV industry punches above its size for reasons that pre-date this deal. Croatian shops have supplied combat FPV drones to the war in Ukraine for years, and the volume plus the feedback loop from that market forced European FPV manufacturing to mature faster than most Western procurement offices realized. Orqa did not build FT1000 growth on trade-show pitches. It built it on serial output that could survive being shot at.
This is geopolitics in full flight. It is a beautiful thing to watch a small Croatian company turn itself into the sovereign supplier of choice for Canada and the United States at the same time. Orqa is not crushing its competition by playing dirty. It walked into an open lane, and it earned the deal with measurable results, not a pitch deck that flatters buyers.
Canada Just Joined SAFE As The First Non-European Member
As PR Newswire reported, the most interesting piece of the announcement is not the money. It is the Canadian designation as the first non-European country invited into the Security Action For Europe (SAFE) initiative, the European instrument built to scale sovereign defence capability across the bloc.
Canada being welcomed into a European industrial security program is the geopolitics moving under the announcement. This deal is the vehicle.
Ivan Jelusic framed the pact in institutional language. This MoU will formalize the strategic framework for cooperation between RRS and Orqa to co-develop, manufacture, and commercialize advanced defence technologies, he said. Kevin Toderel was blunter. Orqa is the global leader in sUAS systems. We are proud to be able to build these systems in Canada, he said.
Croatia Is Selling Sovereign Production To Both Ottawa And Washington
The Canadian deal also arrives inside a larger Orqa play. Weeks earlier the same Croatian company launched Orqa U.S. LLC alongside By Light Professional IT Services, a new US-owned entity built to produce fully American-made unmanned aerial systems for military and government buyers and to deliver Blue UAS-compliant drones through an onshore US industrial base. Croatia is now selling sovereign production to both Ottawa and Washington in parallel.
That is not an accident of timing. It is a business model.
The Canadian version and the US version answer to different rules. Blue UAS in the United States is a Department of War procurement list that pushes DJI hardware out of federal fleets and rewards American-made airframes. Canada does not run a formal Blue UAS equivalent. What Ottawa has instead is political will, a growing defence procurement push and a public appetite for local production.
That reads as opportunity for Orqa. It also reads as pressure on Canadian drone makers who assumed the sovereign card was theirs to play.
The Production Targets Are Aggressive And The Calendar Is Short
The output targets deserve a hard look. One thousand systems per month by mid-2027 is fifteen months from a signature in a boardroom to a factory floor running at scale. Even for a company already shipping into fifty markets, standing up a Canadian production line, hiring 100 people, and validating them for Canadian military use in that window is a stretched calendar. Not impossible. Not comfortable.
The 10,000 systems per month target by 2029 puts Orqa Canada in the same production tier as the biggest FPV makers on the planet. If they hit it, the map of Western drone manufacturing has a new city on it.
The counter-unmanned aircraft piece of the announcement is worth watching separately. Orqa did not build its name in counter-UAS. Adding counter-drone systems to a partnership that leads with FPV production suggests the Canadian side is bringing that capability, or that both companies plan to develop it under the joint venture. The press release does not clarify which.
DroneXL’s Take
Two heads of state and an EU security framework signal that this is not another investor announcement. Governments are visibly steering. Whether Canadian buyers, defence customers first and public safety customers later, actually absorb the output at those production numbers is the question the next 18 months will answer.
Ukraine, not Silicon Valley, is where the real FPV industry grew up. Watching that reality land in North America through a Croatian door should be uncomfortable for the American drone establishment. Two new Orqa factories in North America in the same month, one on each side of the border, is not a friendly wave from Zagreb. It is a scoreboard.
Croatia sold sovereign drones to Canada. Weeks earlier it sold sovereign drones to the United States. The winner in this story is not the buyer. It is the builder that convinced both sides they need the same thing, from the same source.
Photo credit: Orqa
