Two months after CiS demonstrated a drone hangar that launches and recovers an aircraft from a crewless boat moving at 15 knots (28 km/h / 17 mph), the German company has a new problem: it cannot build fast enough. Founder Tom Kaufmann, 25, told regional daily Nordkurier that inquiries from across Europe, military and civilian alike, now exceed what his factory in Bentwisch, on the edge of Rostock, can produce.
When we covered the ORKA Dock unveiling on May 21, the story was the capability claim: a sealed box on the back deck of an uncrewed surface vessel that opens in under 30 seconds, puts a drone in the air, and catches it again on a deck that is pitching and making way at the same time. The story now is what happened after the trade show. A 30-person operation hand-building roughly 100 aircraft a year is fielding demand from navies, coast guards, and emergency services across the continent, and the gap between the two numbers says as much about Europe’s drone industrial base as it does about CiS.
Inquiries Are Not Orders, And The Distinction Matters
Kaufmann described demand that outpaces current production, but no dock customer has been named publicly, and an inquiry is not a purchase order. What he told Nordkurier is that requests span military and civilian users, rescue services among them, and that CiS plans to expand capacity as the ORKA Dock moves into series production. He also drew one line worth recording: CiS does not arm its drones. The ORKA is built for reconnaissance, including work for the Bundeswehr, not for strikes.
The company took its current shape in 2022, when Kaufmann and his brother Matthias took over a firm founded in 1990 as a software and network-information business and pointed it at drones. Scaling a shop that hand-builds about 100 aircraft a year into one that also turns out docks in series is a different business, and CiS has still not published the dock’s weight or footprint. How much deck space it consumes on a smaller hull remains an open question.
SeaSEC Ran The System Against A Live Power Cable
The validation behind the demand was not a vendor demo day. SeaSEC 2026, branded Data2Sea, ran in April out of Rostock and the Mecklenburg Bight under the Northern Naval Capability Cooperation, an alliance of the defense ministries of Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. As Autonocion detailed in its report on the system, organizers wrote a real high-voltage power cable running between Germany and Denmark into the cable-protection scenario, so detection had to work against live infrastructure in genuine Baltic conditions.
The ORKA Dock flew daily for two weeks aboard a FLANQ Q-RECON 24, a 7.3-meter (24-foot) uncrewed surface vessel from CiS’s maritime partner, completing automatic launch and recovery cycles with the boat underway at up to 15 knots. Kaufmann said doing this with no operator intervention “is something that has never been done before” and called it a world first. That label is the company’s own claim, and it reads best narrowly: coordinating aerial and surface drones is not new, but running the full launch-recover-recharge cycle inside a box on a boat that never slows down is the specific thing being claimed.
The recovery relies on CiS’s Precision Landing System and its patented BEACON deck-recognition technology, which tracks the landing platform itself rather than aiming at a fixed GPS point. A LiDAR altimeter rated to 5-millimeter accuracy handles the final touchdown onto a deck that keeps dropping away beneath the aircraft.
The Pairing Turns 75 Minutes Into Persistent Coverage
The ORKA itself flies 75 minutes per sortie with a 5 kg (11 lb) payload, which is not remarkable on its own. The arithmetic changes with the host vessel underneath it. FLANQ lists the Q-RECON 24 at speeds up to 90 km/h (56 mph) with a range of up to 3,000 nautical miles, and the dock recharges the aircraft between sorties. Coverage stops being a function of one battery and becomes a function of how long the hull can loiter. That is carrier logic scaled down to a boat with no crew, which is exactly the kind of persistent uncrewed layer NATO has been pushing into the Baltic since Baltic Sentry launched in January 2025 to watch the cables down there.
One caveat belongs on the record: the Q-RECON 24 is a fast tactical boat designed around this pairing. There is no public evidence yet that the landing system behaves the same on a slow, heavy commercial deck.
Sovereign Components Cover The Dock, Not The Radios
CiS describes the ORKA Dock as designed and built in Germany using sovereign components, and in the current European procurement climate that phrase does real work. It applies to the dock, though, not to everything that flies out of it. CiS’s own product page lists communications options from Silvus, DTC, Doodle Labs, and Herelink, which puts American and British radios inside a German aircraft. The company is upfront about it. Procurement offices reading the spec sheet for supply-chain independence should read it all the way down.
DroneXL’s Take
Europe’s drone problem was never invention. It is production. A 30-person shop in Rostock demonstrated a genuinely hard capability in front of six defense ministries, against a live power cable, and the reward is a stack of inquiries it cannot fill. Meanwhile the capital flows elsewhere: we reported Quantum Systems’ $246 million Bundeswehr contract in December and Stark’s $570 million raise from Sequoia and Thiel in June, the latter for a company whose drones missed every target in four trials. Berlin says it wants sovereign drone capability. The test of that claim is not another funding round for a well-connected startup. It is whether a proven builder like CiS gets the contracts and the capacity investment to turn 100 hand-built aircraft a year into an actual production line.
Two things to watch, both concrete: whether CiS announces a named dock buyer as series production starts, and whether the drone-in-a-box category that DJI, Skydio, and A2Z built on land follows CiS onto the water. Every fixed dock on a substation fence proves the concept works when the box holds still. CiS just showed what happens when it doesn’t, and the Baltic is where the demand lives.
Sources: Autonocion, Nordkurier, CiS.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
