From Técnico to the skies of Ukraine, Ricardo Mendes piloted Tekever to a value of over a billion. The scientist/AI manager says, however, that the journey is still in its early stages.
Lisbon, Instituto Técnico Superior, 2001: Ricardo Mendes and four computer engineering colleagues decide to launch Tekever to take advantage of new opportunities at the intersection of communication networks, artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed systems. “Bootstrapped since Day 1”, reads the company’s website, referring to the slang term used to describe a business that starts with only the founders’ resources, without venture capital or loans.
“We were in our early twenties”, Mendes recalls to ECO. “We were a group of engineers fascinated by the idea of creating something of our own but, above all, something revolutionary: combining artificial intelligence with the field of distributed systems”. The dream was to bring science and imagination together to take these areas to new heights and solve problems that had not even been conceived yet. “It all started with the idea that everything would be connected through Evernet — a concept that eventually came to be called the Internet and gave rise to our name, born from the concept of ‘Technologies for the Evernet’”.
Bedfordshire, United Kingdom, May 2025: British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer praises Tekever’s role in the war in Ukraine, where the company’s drones have already accumulated 10,000 hours of reconnaissance flights. The company led by Mendes reveals that it will invest €470 million in the United Kingdom after signing a contract with the Royal Air Force. The following day, it announces that it has closed a new round of financing, valuing the company at €1.2 billion, surpassing the €1 billion that defines a “unicorn”.
Ricardo Mendes reveals to ECO that before going public, the company sent an email to all employees to share the news. The CEO says that part of that message conveys the company’s perspective well. “We are usually quite reserved when it comes to communicating the company’s value in numbers, because that is not a metric we value highly — we believe that the value we create for our customers, and the growth of each of us, as professionals and as people, is what really matters”, the email reads. “However, the fact that the market believes our company is worth more than €1,000,000,000 is an extraordinary milestone that we should undoubtedly celebrate!”
“We can never get used to war”
What happened in the 24 years between these milestones? If it were possible to answer in the form of a word cloud, the words that would occupy the most space would be drones, AI, Ukraine and adaptability. In the first eight years, the company specialised in developing business software so that companies such as EDP could take advantage of the growing capabilities and mobility of telecommunications networks. But in 2009, it demonstrated its chameleon-like nature by shifting to the production of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, better known as drones, for the security and defence sectors.
The decision had been under consideration for some time. They began to realise that there were sectors that were traditionally approached from a more conservative hardware perspective, and for Tekever, “it was very clear that in the future, our capabilities, particularly in the areas of mobile networks, artificial intelligence and distributed computing, would be key differentiators”, explained Mendes on ECO’s “À Prova de Futuro” podcast in February.
One such sector was drones, which was dominated by companies that had been producing aeroplanes and viewed drones as “smaller aeroplanes”. “We look at this sector as computers with wings, they are networked computers with wings,” explained the CEO in the podcast. Contracts with the European Maritime Safety Agency and the British government for surveillance in the English Channel drove expansion, but the turning point and recognition came with the RAF’s use of the company’s reconnaissance drones in Ukraine.
Mendes responds directly when asked by ECO for this portrait whether he still gets nervous when he goes to Ukraine, or if he has gotten used to it. “War can never be something we get used to”, he declares.
“When we visit Ukraine, we feel, above all, respect for the people who fight daily to defend their freedom, the sovereignty of their country — and, ultimately, peace, as simple as that”, he emphasises. “It is not adrenaline that drives us in conflict situations: it is the awareness that we are on the right side of history, with technology that makes a difference and saves lives.”
The same “initial spark”, but more global
Inventor Thomas Edison, mathematician Alan Turing, and computer scientist Yann LeCun are the three figures who inspired Mendes — a scientist with a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degree who became a manager, as he revealed in a recent Expresso podcast. But how has his role and daily life as CEO changed with Tekever’s growth? “I am just the most visible face of a management team that works together every day to maintain a clear vision of the path we want to take and to ensure that we have the necessary resources to do so”, he says.
“Of course, everyone’s day-to-day life has changed substantially as the company has grown, and leading a team of 1,000 people is different from leading a team of 100 — in addition to maintaining a huge focus on our people and attracting the best talent, we have to pay constant attention to the organisational structure and underlying processes to ensure that we remain an extremely agile organisation, even at a significant scale”, he adds.
For Ricardo Mendes, that scale is set to continue to grow. He recalls that in the beginning, in 2021, he did not think about limits: “We just wanted to do things that were relevant to the world.”
“Today, when I look at Tekever as the European leader in artificial intelligence-based aerial systems, I see that same initial spark, only now on a global scale”, he points out. “But I think we all feel that, despite our history and the scale we have already achieved, we are still at the beginning of the journey.”