The Netherlands-based power solutions company has battle-tested its technology on the front lines of Europe. It is now bringing it to American drone manufacturers with a performance claim the industry can’t ignore: double the flight time, no hardware changes required.
By: Dawn Zoldi
The drone industry has a giant blind spot. For all the innovation in airframes, sensors and autonomy software, most UAV manufacturers still power their platforms with off-the-shelf battery packs assembled from the same commodity cells used in dozens of other applications, yet optimized for none of them. This works, mostly, but leaves enormous performance on the table.
Tulip Tech, a Netherlands-based UAV battery company founded by Bernd Rietberg, has built its entire business model on that gap. In its recent world premiere broadcast on the Autonomy Global Network, Rietberg unveiled his company’s U.S. market entry and laid out a case for why custom, mission-engineered battery solutions are an operational necessity.
Off-the-Shelf Batteries Fail Drone Operators
Rietberg didn’t mince words about the state of the industry. “Someone who doesn’t know about batteries could think a battery is a battery,” he said. “But a battery that goes into an EV is vastly different from a battery for a drone. The chemistry is completely different.”
The problem isn’t that battery manufacturers are incompetent. It’s that drone companies, stretched thin on engineering resources, buy what’s available and move on. The result is a platform whose airframe, sensors and flight controller may all be optimized for a specific mission, but whose power source was never part of that conversation.
Tulip Tech starts the conversation there. Every customer engagement begins with four questions:
- What is this drone doing?
- Where will it fly?
- What are the performance requirements?
- And what environmental conditions will it face ?
From those answers, Rietberg’s engineering team draws on a database of more than 50 cell suppliers to identify the chemistry that fits, not the chemistry that’s most available.
The Process That Powers Performance
Tulip Tech’s R&D methodology runs from computational simulation through rapid prototyping, exhaustive field testing and production scaling. The company operates two facilities in the Netherlands, a headquarters with full design and engineering capability and a separate production facility.
The scale has grown significantly. Rietberg noted that Tulip Tech crossed 100,000 battery packs delivered in a single month and is on track to reach one million packs this calendar year. That volume matters for reasons beyond revenue. It gives the company a supplier leverage that individual drone manufacturers simply cannot match. “Because we represent such a big volume for those cell suppliers, we get benefits, including custom cells,” Rietberg explained. “We can look at the drone, look at the shape you want that battery to be, and then customize the cell to that specific shape with the right chemistry inside it.”
The company’s battery families reflect this engineering breadth. The Electrica line targets high-performing, cost-effective missions; the Enerza pushes energy density to 400–525 Wh/kg using solid-state chemistry; the Ampera targets maximum performance at minimum weight up to 450 Wh/kg; the Voltera prioritizes high-voltage reliability over 800-plus cycles; and the Endura handles high-discharge versatility. For operators who want integrated intelligence, the Osiris smart battery family adds real-time monitoring and safety management in a plug-and-play format. And then, of course, there’s the bespoke custom batteries on top of those.
The Proof Point: 100 Percent More Flight Time
Numbers like “double the flight time” tend to generate skepticism in this industry, which Rietberg acknowledged. “We’ve had many customers being skeptical, because they’ve been told so many times that it will work and it didn’t,” he said. His answer to that skepticism is DeltaQuad.
Working with the fixed-wing drone manufacturer, Tulip Tech engineers replaced the existing battery pack with a custom-engineered solution. This resulted in a 100 percent increase in flight time, four full hours, without any other hardware modification. As another example, the Corvus drone saw a 30 to 40 percent reduction in battery weight, which freed up payload capacity without sacrificing endurance.
“It’s not rocket science,” Rietberg said. “We look at the drone, we look at the application and then we find the best battery cell chemistry that fits. Finding that really good battery cell and chemistry is quite difficult for a drone company to do themselves. There are hundreds of cell companies, all claiming they have the best battery out there.” Tulip Tech’s competitive edge is that it has already done the work to rise above that noise across that entire market.
Battle-Tested in Ukraine, Proven Across Domains
When Tulip Tech says “battle-tested,” it means that literally. The company has delivered hundreds of thousands of battery packs to European defense ministries and directly to Ukrainian forces. It has an active team based in Kyiv that provides on-the-ground support and collects operational feedback.
Ukrainian operators have logged consistent performance gains of 50 to 100 percent extended flight time across the full range of drone applications, from ISR platforms and interceptor drones to strike systems, and bombardment variants.
The feedback loop is continuous. Every insight from deployed operations feeds back into the next product iteration. Soldiers in the field have taken to calling them “the green batteries,” in recognition of the distinctive tulip-green packs and the flight time advantage that comes with them.
The battlefield has also pushed Tulip Tech beyond the air domain. A recent engagement involved an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) where the company discovered that buoyancy requirements made battery weight just as critical underwater as aerodynamic efficiency makes it in the air. Ground robots and maritime autonomous systems are now on Rietberg’s radar as he expands the company’s multi-domain footprint.
Opening a U.S. Front: The Manufacturing Play
The core news of the Autonomy Global world premiere was the announcement of Tulip Tech’s U.S. manufacturing entry. Rietberg confirmed that the company plans to be operational in the United States by Q4 of this year. It will replicate and upgrade its Netherlands automated production line into what he called “a Generation 2” facility.
The U.S. factory will also target one million battery packs annually, designed with maximum modularity to switch rapidly between hundreds of different product configurations at high volume. This is in direct response to the reality that every drone program generates unique battery requirements. The facility will run both cylindrical and pouch cell lines to cover the widest possible range of drone platform architectures.
The timing aligns with an unmistakable shift in U.S. drone procurement policy. The U.S. government has put defense contractors and enterprise operators under increasing pressure to source components domestically or from trusted allied partners. That pressure will only tighten.
“Every year, it’s going to be stricter and stricter,” Rietberg said of U.S. supply chain requirements, noting that major existing clients have already asked Tulip Tech to establish domestic production. The company’s supplier network, which spans more than 50 partners with non-Chinese sourcing options built in, positions it to meet NDAA compliance requirements that increasingly govern what defense-adjacent operators can fly.
The B2B Model That Changes the Conversation
For U.S. drone manufacturers considering an engagement, Rietberg pitched a co-engineering model. A prospective client doesn’t browse a website and order a battery. They get a consultation, a deep-dive on their platform and mission requirements, a design-and-simulation phase, rapid prototyping, field testing, and then, verified by actual flight results, a production agreement.
“For every single application, we engineer from the mission profile and from the user perspective, to make sure the battery pack is fully custom, built for that exact mission it’s trying to achieve,” Rietberg said.
This approach resonates especially for the no-fail missions where endurance is not simply a performance metric, but a real safety requirement. In BVLOS medical logistics, the battery cannot be the weak link in a blood delivery run. In ISR, every minute of reduced flight time equates to intelligence lost. In search and rescue, a battery that gives out early is a mission that may have contributed to losing a life. As the FAA’s Part 108 BVLOS framework moves toward implementation, the operators who will be ready to scale are the ones who have already solved for endurance at the power source.Whereas the brick-and-mortar facilities are coming soon, Tulip Tech’s U.S. team is already here in the U.S. and actively engaged in the industry. They are on the floor at AUVSI XPONENTIAL, where potential partners can meet the engineers who will be building the batteries that their next platform flies on. If you aren’t in Detroit, but ready to stop leaving flight time on the table, you can always reach Tulip Tech at tulip.tech/batteries.