€1m · Other round · Telecom · Ankara, Türkiye
Ankara-based Arke Telekom, which develops resilient communications for unmanned systems, has raised €1m in new funding from ACT Venture Partners. Tech.eu reports that the capital will support international expansion and a broader product portfolio for different unmanned platforms.
Resilience depends on rerouting, not a stronger link
ArkeLink is designed for tactical UAVs operating under electronic warfare, signal jamming and satellite-navigation disruption. The company combines software-defined radio with a self-forming, self-healing mesh network, so traffic can be rerouted when an individual link is lost. Arke Telekom describes the product as a GNSS-independent, frequency-hopping communications system intended to remain adaptable in contested conditions.
That architecture moves part of the value from radio range to network continuity. A single unmanned aircraft may lose a direct path because of terrain, movement or interference; a mesh can preserve the wider network by finding another route. Commercially, the opportunity is to make that resilience compact enough for smaller platforms and repeatable across several vehicle types. The constraint is integration: each manufacturer still has to fit the radio, software and network behaviour into its own airframe and mission system.
International growth needs repeatable integration
Arke Telekom has been selected for NATO DIANA's 2026 cohort under Advanced Communication Technologies. The company says the programme gives it access to testing infrastructure, mentors and end-user feedback as it adapts the system to operational requirements. That is useful validation access, but it is not evidence of procurement or deployment; the financing now has to help turn testing and feedback into products that international customers can adopt.
The company brings a longer technical base than a newly formed defence startup. Its official team history says Saygun Önay and Barış Karadeniz founded Arke Telekom in 2014 after careers in communications, waveform design and embedded systems. The execution test is whether that specialist engineering can become a standard product layer for multiple unmanned-system makers, rather than a series of bespoke projects. If ArkeLink can reuse the same core mesh architecture while limiting platform-specific work, each integration can open a route to more units without expanding engineering effort at the same pace.
