About us
We named the first one after the owl for a reason.
The hubro hunts by holding still, watching a familiar territory and reacting the instant something in it changes. That is the whole design brief.
Origin
Started by autonomy specialists, not airframe builders.
Bjerkvik Defence was founded in 2025 by a small group of AI and robotics specialists. The problem they set out to solve was never a shortage of sensors. It was that every sensor demanded a human to interpret it, and humans are poor at staring at unchanging pictures for eight hours.
So we inverted it. Let the system learn what the site normally looks like, and let it speak up only when reality diverges from that. The operator stops watching and starts deciding.
Mission
Give small teams the reach of large ones.
Norway has a long coast, a longer border and not many people to cover either. That constraint shapes everything we build: systems that a handful of operators can run, that keep working when the link drops, and that survive weather nobody would choose to work in.
We would rather build four systems that genuinely work together than a catalogue of things that do not.
What we hold to
Three commitments we do not trade away.
Autonomy that reports
Recording everything is easy and nearly useless. Our systems establish a baseline and surface the deviations from it, so what reaches the operator is signal rather than hours of footage.
Arctic by default
Cold soak, icing, salt spray and polar darkness are design constraints from the first sketch. Everything is flown in them, in the north, before it is offered to anyone else.
The operator commands
No machine decision is hidden. Every autonomous action is visible in Eyrie with its reasoning attached, and can be overridden immediately. Autonomy assists judgement; it does not replace it.
Capability
What we are actually good at.
We are a systems company rather than an airframe company. The aircraft matter, but the value sits in what happens between the sensor and the operator's decision.
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Autonomy and machine learning
Unsupervised baseline modelling and anomaly detection that runs on the aircraft, not in a data centre. No connectivity required to raise an alert.
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Sensor fusion
Electro-optical, infrared and acoustic contacts resolved into single tracks across air, ground and water, so one event does not arrive as three separate alarms.
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Operator interfaces
Eyrie is built in-house alongside the aircraft. Control, autonomy and interface are designed as one thing rather than integrated afterwards.
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Cold-weather engineering
Battery chemistry, de-icing, sealing and materials chosen for a climate that punishes every shortcut.
Track record
Where we have got to.
From the first prototype onwards, one rule we have not broken: nothing leaves us until it has survived a winter above the Arctic Circle.
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Founded in Oslo
A small team, one workshop, and a standing arrangement to fly everything we build in the north.
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Eyrie version 1
Multi-asset control from one console, built in-house from the first week rather than bought in.
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First Hubro prototype flies
First autonomous flights of the Hubro airframe under Eyrie control.
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Arpia transitions to wing-borne flight
Vertical launch to 167 km/h cruise and back, unattended, in the last of the winter weather.
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Hubro enters service
First operational sites, standing watch on critical infrastructure.
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Kutling concept work under way
The passive acoustic array is at the concept stage: design targets set, node hardware and sea trials still ahead.
The name
Why we are called Bjerkvik.
Bjerkvik is a village of a few thousand people at the head of Herjangsfjorden, a short drive north of Narvik. It is not where our offices are. It is a place that keeps turning out to matter far more than its size suggests.
In 1940 it was the main German base in the region during the Battle of Narvik, and the ground the Allies had to take to threaten the town. The Norwegian Army is still there today. Two generations apart, the same conclusion: whoever can see the terrain first sets the terms of what happens on it.
That is the argument our systems are built around, so we put it in the name.
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1940
Bjerkvik serves as the German garrison's principal base in the Narvik region through the campaign for the town and its ore railway.
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13 May 1940
Allied troops go ashore at Bjerkvik under fire, in one of the earliest opposed amphibious landings of the war.
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Today
A standing Norwegian Army presence, and one of the few places in Europe where Arctic ground and Arctic weather are both routine.
Where we work
Oslo, and 68.5° north.
The company, its engineering and its workshop are in Oslo. That is where the people we build for sit, where the robotics and machine learning talent is, and where a supplier can be at our bench the same afternoon.
Qualification happens elsewhere. Twice a year the whole team moves north for trial campaigns, because a cold chamber will tell you a battery survives −30 °C and it will not tell you what happens when driving snow, marginal light and a fifteen metre per second gust front arrive at once.
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Oslo
Engineering, autonomy development, integration and the hardware bench, in one building.
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Northern trials
Fjord, mountain and forest environments, polar darkness from late November, and temperatures that reach the bottom of our qualification range without any help from us.
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Close to the users
Norwegian and allied units train in the north year-round, which keeps the feedback loop short in both directions.
Work with us, or come work here.
We are always interested in partners with hard problems, and in engineers who do not mind spending part of every winter above the Arctic Circle.