Exail
French maker of naval drones for mine clearance (uncrewed boats and underwater vehicles, not aircraft) and inertial navigation; Thales agreed to buy it.
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What It Is
Exail builds the drones navies use to find and destroy sea mines: uncrewed surface boats, underwater vehicles and towed sonars, run from one control system. Its other main business is inertial navigation, built on fibre-optic gyroscopes, for ships, submarines, land vehicles and spacecraft. It does not make military aircraft.
The listed company is Exail Technologies, traded on Euronext Paris under the ticker EXA. It took its present shape in 2022, when the group bought iXblue, a navigation and photonics firm founded in 2000, and merged it with ECA Group, its robotics arm since 1992. Raphaël Gorgé is chairman and chief executive. The company says it sells in nearly 80 countries and earns most of its revenue from defence.
Key Products
UMIS is the mine countermeasures system. It ties surface drones, underwater vehicles, towed sonars and mine-disposal vehicles to one control system. Each kit delivered to the Belgian and Dutch navies from March 2026 holds two Inspector 125 surface drones, three A-18 underwater vehicles, two T-18 towed sonars, Seascan and K-Ster C disposal vehicles and two Saab Skeldar V200 helicopter drones. Exail builds everything in the kit except the aircraft at its plant in Ostend, Belgium.
K-Ster is the expendable mine-disposal vehicle. In the fourth quarter of 2025 Exail booked about €40 million for several hundred of them through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency.
DriX is a family of uncrewed survey and surveillance boats, from the medium-range DriX H-8 to the transoceanic DriX O-16. The company rates the largest for missions of up to 30 days.
Business and Financial Position
Exail reported 2025 revenue of €479 million, up 28%, and current EBITDA of €103 million. Net income was reported at €5.9 million, before the restatement described below. Orders reached €844 million, up 87%, and the order book closed the year at €1,074 million. Navigation and maritime robotics brought in €373 million of the revenue.
The biggest order was a €400 million mine countermeasures contract signed in the first quarter of 2025. When Exail announced the win on 11 February 2025 it named only “a leading navy”, and the customer is still undisclosed. Deliveries run over four years. The company targets a 25% EBITDA margin once a major mine-hunting programme enters production.
On 6 July 2026 Thales agreed to buy the Gorgé family’s 35.51% stake at €134 a share, an enterprise value of €3.9 billion. Thales will then make a mandatory offer for the rest at the same price. It expects the stake purchase to close by the third quarter of 2027 and the offer by early 2028. Exclusive talks with Safran had ended three days before.
The deal led Exail to re-examine contracts signed when it bought iXblue in 2022. In its first-half 2026 results, published on 9 October 2026 after two delays, it restated its past accounts to record liabilities to the investor ICG (€329 million at the end of June) and to staff share plans (€126 million) that had been left out or understated. First-half revenue rose 25% to €275 million and current EBITDA 43% to €63 million, but the restatement brought a net loss of €87 million. Exail says cash flow and the terms of the Thales deal are unchanged.
Why It Matters
Belgium and the Netherlands are buying their next mine-hunting fleet as new ships carrying Exail’s drone kits. Exail says it is the only company with every drone that underwater mine clearance needs. Those kits still carry Saab’s helicopter drones.
Thales wants Exail for underwater warfare and inertial navigation, and targets more than €90 million a year in synergies by 2032. The largest order behind the order book is one €400 million contract for a navy Exail has not named, delivered over four years. The review for the Thales deal also cut Exail’s restated group equity at the end of 2025 from €413 million to €169 million.
