Security that stays in Europe

Europe talks about sovereignty. Too little gets built.

Energy, logistics, industry and data infrastructure are the backbone of the European economy, and they are increasingly a target. Fences get cut, cables get stolen, and sites are probed by people and by drones. Europe has responded with new rules such as NIS2 and the Critical Entities Resilience Directive, and with a lot of talk about technological sovereignty.

The equipment that actually protects these sites tells a different story. Most drones flying over European sites are designed and built outside Europe, and so are the flight software, the apps and the cloud services that come with them. Operators who want a European alternative often find there isn't one that is ready to deploy. Writing strategies is easy. Designing a flight controller, building a base station that survives winter on a solar park, and writing software that an operator can trust at three in the morning is the hard part, and that is the part we do.

The cloud became a single point of failure

Many modern security systems only work while they are connected. Video, detection, mission control and user access run through a vendor's cloud. That creates three problems.

• It stops when the link stops. Remote sites have the weakest connections, and an intruder who cuts the line or jams the signal can switch off security that depends on it. A protection system should not have an internet dependency as its weakest point.
• You do not control it. Features, prices and terms change when the vendor decides. If the service is discontinued or the vendor leaves the market, the hardware on your site can stop being useful.
• You cannot audit it. When the logic runs on someone else's servers, you cannot fully see who accessed what, which commands were sent, or what changed.

Where does your security data go?

A security drone collects more than video. It records the layout of your site, where the fences and cameras are, patrol routes and timings, how fast alarms are answered, and where the gaps are. Put together, that is a map of your vulnerabilities.

In a cloud-first system, that map lives on servers you do not own, often operated by companies outside the EU. Hosting in a European data centre does not settle the question on its own. What matters is who operates the service, which jurisdiction they answer to, and who can get access to the data. For a critical site, the question is not only whether data is encrypted, but who holds the keys.

What we are building

Nestua's mission is to give European operators autonomous security they fully own: our own software and our own hardware, running on site, keeping data local, and built in Europe from European components wherever we can. These are the principles behind every part of it.

• Local first. Flight control, missions, geofences, video, detection and the audit log run on an edge node on site. Patrols continue when the internet does not. The cloud is optional, for remote viewing, storage or fleet management when you want it. See why local control matters.
• Your data stays yours. Recordings stay in a local ring buffer, and uploading them off site is disabled by default. Person and vehicle detection runs on site and does not identify individuals.
• Our own software. The platform that runs on site, from mission control and geofencing to video, detection and the audit log, is written by our team. We know every part of it, and we can fix and change it without waiting for anyone else.
• Our own hardware. We design the drone, the flight controller and the base station ourselves, instead of rebranding someone else's product. Our H743 flight controller is designed in the Czech Republic, with the PCB made and assembled in Europe.
• European components wherever possible. We choose parts from European manufacturers first: the processor, barometer, IMU and power stage on our flight controller come from ST, Bosch, NXP, Nexperia and Würth. Where no European part exists, we say so and choose suppliers we can trace and replace.
• Open foundations, no lock-in. We build on ArduPilot and MAVLink, open standards used across the drone industry, rather than a closed stack only we can maintain.
• Accountable by design. Admin, operator and viewer roles, remote control disabled by default, and an exportable log of every command and configuration change, so operators can show what happened and who did it.
• Honest about limits. A drone is a mobile camera, not a guard. We will tell you when it does not fit your site, and we are clear about what is finished and what is not.

Where we are today

We are a small engineering team in Prague. The software platform is functional in development builds. The drone and the base station are still being built. The Nestua H743 flight controller is the first piece of our hardware that you can order. If you run a site in Europe and want to help shape a European alternative, talk to us. You can also meet the team.