The defence technology firm MARSS has opened a new office in Nice and begun recruiting to double the size of its global artificial intelligence team, in a move that places its European headquarters inside the European Union as demand for its counter-drone systems grows, the company has said.
Announced live from the Eurosatory exhibition in Paris, the investment brings what MARSS describes as a highly capable technology team to France, while the company retains its established bases in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia and works closely with its new parent company, EOS. The firm casts the move as a deliberate step closer to its growing base of European and EU customers and partners, giving it a presence within the bloc at a moment when appetite for counter-drone capability is accelerating across the region.
MARSS makes NiDAR, an AI-enabled command-and-control and sensor-fusion platform that the company describes as a market-leading counter-drone system, already embedded with customers across the Middle East and, it says, active in defeating drone attacks. Command and control is the layer that fuses incoming sensor data, classifies a threat and coordinates a response, turning a collection of radars, cameras and weapons into a working air defence system, and it is the part of the counter-drone problem on which MARSS has built its business.
As part of the expansion the company is recruiting across its technology team, aiming to double its size by drawing on the French talent pool, expanding its engineering competency and deepening its AI expertise, a step it frames as essential to keep innovating against constantly changing threats.
The founder and chief executive of MARSS, Johannes Pinl, said combining the firm with EOS gave it “the strength and the backing to invest in the things that have always set MARSS apart: our people and our technology”. Opening the new combined European headquarters in the south of France, he said, would let the company “grow our engineering and AI talent significantly and get closer to our European customers and partners”. The threats customers faced did not stand still, he added, “and neither do we”, with the firm doubling its technology team to put more of “the brightest minds” onto NiDAR and keep its customers a step ahead of a fast-evolving drone threat.
The Nice expansion comes days after MARSS announced at the same exhibition that it had been selected by BAE Systems to provide the command-and-control system for BATS, the British firm’s most advanced counter-drone capability, with NiDAR to act as the integrating layer tying together its sensors and effectors. Visitors to Eurosatory can see the system on show alongside EOS’s own systems on the company’s stand.
