Tekever Doubles Its French Investment to €200 Million Over Five Years at Choose France 2026 — Cahors Excellence Centre Hits Summer Opening as 200 Skilled Jobs Land Across Occitânia and Nouvelle-Aquitaine

Tekever, the Portuguese drone manufacturer that became Portugal's most recent unicorn in May 2025, has doubled its previously announced French expansion programme to €200 million over five years, the company confirmed at the 9th edition of the Choose France summit hosted at the Palace of Versailles on Monday 1 June 2026. The revised commitment adds 200 highly skilled jobs across the Occitânia and Nouvelle-Aquitaine regions and brings the Cahors industrial centre online over the summer, materially ahead of the original timeline tabled twelve months ago.

From €100 million to €200 million in twelve months

The expanded pledge supersedes the €100 million figure Ricardo Mendes, Tekever's co-founder and chief executive, announced at the 2025 edition of the French presidential investment summit. The first tranche routed funding into a 4,500-square-metre production hall in the former Grand Cahors expo park, alongside operational hubs in Bordeaux and Toulouse. Tekever already counts about forty people on the French payroll and now expects to reach close to one hundred staff before year-end — hitting its original three-year hiring target in roughly eighteen months.

The Cahors site becomes the European assembly hub

For the Lisbon-headquartered group, the Cahors plant becomes the European assembly, integration and testing site for the AR3 and AR5 unmanned aerial systems that have logged thousands of operational hours over the Black Sea on contracts with the Ukrainian Navy. Mendes framed the doubled investment as Tekever's bid to "build from France a sovereign industrial backbone turned toward export markets for autonomous systems in defence, security and space" — language that tracks the European Defence Industrial Strategy and the EU's ReArm Europe plan tabled in March 2025. The 2026 commitment also threads the Portuguese government's Estratégia para a Indústria de Defesa (Defence Industry Strategy) approved in February.

Why doubling down in France matters

The decision lands at a delicate moment for Portuguese technology sovereignty. Tekever is one of only two Portuguese unicorns currently active in defence-relevant technology, the other being Feedzai on the financial-crime side. By placing additional production capacity inside the Eurozone's second-largest economy — and Portugal's prime ally on the European Defence Fund instrument — Tekever positions itself to capture a share of Paris's announced €413 billion Loi de Programmation Militaire 2024-2030 (military programming law). The dual-use angle, spanning both defence and civilian maritime surveillance, also unlocks repeat access to the European Maritime Safety Agency's drone-services tender stack, which has rolled over annually since 2018.

No corresponding pull-back in Lisbon

The foreign expansion does not translate into reduced activity at home. Tekever continues to run design, software and core electronics engineering out of Carnaxide and Ponte de Sor, and the drone-pilot training centre opened in Peniche in March 2026 is already on track to qualify more than one hundred operators this year. The company has also opened a US hub in Norfolk, Virginia, reinforced its UK presence around Swindon, and announced an Estonian expansion late last month. The Cahors investment therefore forms one piece of a multinational reorientation aimed at scaling production beyond the AR5's current European baseline rather than substituting Portuguese capacity. For the Portuguese exchequer, the structural read is that one of the country's defining new-economy companies is choosing to grow its industrial footprint inside the EU rather than offshore it — a quietly favourable signal at a moment when European industrial policy is the dominant capital-allocation theme.