#Community
A drone that flies and swims. Built by Moldovans in Denmark
Cosmin Ciorbă (20) and Andrei Copaci (22) have known each other for half their lives. They speak Romanian in their Aalborg lab, where Moldovan music hums in the background. “It keeps us working,” Cosmin laughs. When he explained to his grandmother that their drone also dives, she looked both amazed and suspicious: “That’s not something you hear every day.”
18 Nov 2025
Cosmin and Andrei were awarded by the President of the Republic of Moldova in May 2022 for outstanding results at the Regeneron ISEF 2022 International Science and Engineering Competition. Photo credit: Cosmin Ciorba’s archive
Young engineers in their early twenties turned a student experiment into a hybrid drone.
Cosmin Ciorbă (20) and Andrei Copaci (22) have known each other for half their lives. They speak Romanian in their Aalborg lab, where Moldovan music hums in the background. “It keeps us working,” Cosmin laughs. When he explained to his grandmother that their drone also dives, she looked both amazed and suspicious: “That’s not something you hear every day.”
The two inventors have been friends for years. First they were teammates in a robotics club in Moldova’s capital, and later they became co-founders exploring early automation projects. As kids in the robotics club, Cosmin and Andrei spent weekends soldering circuits and racing FPV drones at the city’s aerodrome. Once, they built a docking station that could swap a drone’s battery in under twelve seconds.
Now backed by angel investors, the two founders are rethinking drone technology from the ground up developing a vehicle that can both fly and dive. They chose Denmark for a reason: the Odense region offers a true “sandbox for drones,” with open testing zones and easy access to maritime environments.
Before securing their first funding, Cosmin and Andrei met with dozens of experts and investors, not to pitch a polished idea, but to gather honest feedback and understand what it would take to build a viable product. The founders say only that their angel investors are Danish businesspeople who serve not just as backers, but also as advisors and industry guides.
Cosmin and Andrei showcasing their high-school project Autonomous Docking Station for Drones (Survole) — an early step toward what would become Nereus Dynamics. Photo: Cosmin Ciorba’s archive
“We were still green at the beginning,” Cosmin admits. For them, that meant leaving Moldova to study abroad, one in Denmark, the other in the Netherlands and returning to the project only after their early prototype began to attract real attention.
Their friendship became the seed of Nereus Dynamics, the company behind a drone that moves seamlessly between air and water, without putting human life in danger. “Every meter we can cover without risking a person is progress,” Cosmin says. And that progress is timely.
Hybrid air-water drones aren’t new: Rutgers University introduced the first such prototype, Naviator, in 2015. Chinese researchers demonstrated a similar transition in 2023, and the U.S. Navy is still testing an updated version, according to Inside Unmanned Systems (June 2025). But Nereus Dynamics would be Europe’s first commercially viable hybrid drone.
“We are building in Europe for Europe,” Cosmin says. “Most of our parts are sourced here because we don’t want to depend on outside supply chains. The goal is to set a European standard for hybrid drones and build technology that lasts.”
Drones can save lives
“Nearly every aerial mission stops at the surface,” Andrei explains. “We wanted to connect what’s above and below.” The aim is simple to say and hard to do: a drone that dives into water to inspect, gathers data, and takes off again with minimal human intervention and maximum safety.
Commercial diving remains one of the world’s most dangerous professions, according to DAN Europe. Routine checks of ship hulls, bridge pillars, port structures, and offshore turbines still rely on professional divers or rented remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). A professional dive team can cost up to twice as much as an ROV-based operation. Cosmin Ciorba notes: European dive team can cost €2,500 and more per day, and ROV crews aren’t far behind once you count boats, setup, and weather delays.
A hybrid drone changes that math: the same vehicle can assess damage above the waterline, cross the surface to look underneath, and come back with sonar, video, and quick 3D maps while keeping people out of harm’s way.
Photo: Cosmin Ciorba’s archive
Moldovan way of engineering
Three months ago, Andrei uploaded a video of the first Nereus Dynamics' prototype, his Bachelor’s project for Applied Industrial Electronics at the Aalborg University. It gathered over 49,000 views, with comments praising the innovation. And finally, with this video, Cosmin and Andrei’s parents and grandparents could understand what the two young Moldovans were building. “It was hardest to explain to my grandma,” Cosmin laughs. “She barely sees a drone; imagine telling her about one that also swims.”
To further work on this project, Cosmin paused his Bachelor’s program in the Netherlands and moved to Denmark to join Andrei, who had just finished his undergraduate degree in Denmark while being enrolled in a TU Delft Master’s program. They chose to work on Nereus Dynamics full time. This felt risky for Moldovan families but natural in Denmark. “We are doing this for Europe,” Cosmin says, “but also to put Moldova on the map.”
Today, the team remains lean: two Moldovan founders, a Polish engineer, and a handful of contractors. “You solve one problem and find another hiding underneath,” Andrei says with a smirk. Their pace is steady rather than flashy, and on long nights, the Moldovan music in the background keeps the energy up. “We didn’t come here to build gadgets,” Cosmin says. “We came to build something that lasts.”
Their first prototype used variable-pitch propellers, blades that change angle depending on the medium. The principle is common in helicopter engineering but rare in hybrid drones. It worked for a time, until “salt, pressure, vibration, everything attacked the mechanism,” Andrei recalls. The lesson was clear: surviving two environments is far more challenging than simply entering them. Now, the founders are developing a new drive system they plan to patent.
First Nereus Dynamics prototype. Photo: Cosmin Ciorba’s archive
Moldova can compete
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) governs the EU’s airspace, while underwater operations fall under fragmented port and national maritime rules. There is still no unified EU category for amphibious drones, which creates a gap for machines designed to operate in both environments, and a gap that could become an opportunity.
Operating between air and water also means living between laws, grants, and funding timelines. “Who governs a hybrid?” Cosmin asks. “We don’t know. The tech hasn’t reached the mass market yet.” The team wants to help write those rules, making Nereus Dynamics one of the first European-built standards for hybrid robotics.
There are serious competitors in the USA, they admit, but Moldovan founders already secured a Danish innovation grant to cover patent costs – a government SME scheme run by the Danish Business Hubs (Erhvervshusene) which reimburses 75% of patenting costs up to DKK 75,000 per year (around €10,000).
For Cosmin and Andrei, building in Denmark doesn’t mean leaving Moldova behind. This country taught them persistence and precision. From medical robotics to smart farming, Moldovan innovators are proving that a small ecosystem can compete on a European scale.
Moldova’s growing footprint
Two striking examples stand beside Nereus. Solvi, another Moldova-born company, watches the world from the air. Its drones scan test plots and crops with near-millimeter precision. Using their PlantAI system, they reduce weeks of manual crop inspections to hours that allow them to count leaves, map stress zones, and predict yield. Recently, Solvi partnered with the U.S. company Intelinair to bring this technology to large-scale corn and soybean farms.
A multispectral drone reveals early plant stress invisible to the naked eye. Photo credit: solvi.ag
Then, Moldovan co-founder Dorin Cerbu from XiniX AI introduced a prototype called “Sprout”. It’s a soft robot that “grows” like vines to inspect places too narrow or dangerous for people to enter. The flagship prototype extends through industrial systems carrying cameras and sensors on its tip, mapping corrosion and cracks before they turn into accidents. The company won second place at the 2025 euRobotics Entrepreneurship Award, joined Odense Robotics and began a paid pilot with a major energy company.
Xinix built a robot that folds out like a sock and can access very narrow spaces, where it would be dangerous for humans to enter. Photo credit: Odense Robotcs Startup Fund / screenshot
“Before I left home after high school, I was upset that I couldn’t start something at home,” Cosmin recalls. “Now I see it differently. We grow in Denmark, we develop here, and then we bring it back to Moldova.”
Andrei underlines: “I really hope that we’re also contributing to putting our country more on the European map. Some people don’t even know where Moldova is, but once they see what we’re building, it starts a real conversation.”
This article has been written by Journo Birds, with the support of the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Leave your email to subscribe to our newsletters *
By subscribing you agree with our Privacy Policy
© 2024 Startup Moldova Foundation. All rights reserved.
