Palantir veteran joins Stendr as Founding Engineer to accelerate AI-Native defence systems

OSLO, Norway — September 10, 2026 — Stendr, the European vertically integrated defense platform, today announced the appointment of Michael Kattouf as Founding Engineer. 

Kattouf joins Stendr after 13 years at Palantir, where his experience spans frontline software deployment, U.S. Department of Defense programs, and the expansion of Palantir’s European operations. He began his career as a Forward Deployed Engineer in Washington, D.C., working directly with early defence users to integrate Palantir’s software in operational environments. He helped accelerate information triage and operational planning, replacing manual processes with AI-driven workflows designed for environments where security, traceability, and reliability are critical.

He later became a Tech Lead on Palantir’s largest U.S. government engagements, including work with the Department of Defense, leading teams responsible for integrating intelligence data into operational planning and owning some of Palantir's most complex infrastructure migrations, including its first deployment onto secure government cloud infrastructure. As Palantir expanded into Europe, Kattouf relocated to help establish the company’s Scandinavian presence, where he most recently led customer portfolio growth and technical capability development across the region.

His appointment comes as European militaries face a rapidly changing battlefield and an urgent need for defence systems that can be deployed faster, operate at scale, and reduce dependence on legacy infrastructure.

“Europe has spent too long investing in legacy systems that no longer meet the needs of the modern battlefield,” said Michael Kattouf, Founding Engineer at Stendr. “The gaps in European defence capability are becoming extremely clear, yet the solutions are anything but. What drew me to Stendr is the scale of what the team is trying to build, and the seriousness with which they're building it. I’ve spent thirteen years on both sides of the Atlantic working on these problems. The moment for Europe to own its own capabilities is here, and I believe Stendr has a lot it can contribute.”

At Stendr, Kattouf will lead technical delivery and forward deployment of the company’s systems, bringing deep experience in taking defence technology from engineering environments into the institutions and operational settings where it needs to work.

“Passive radars that are resilient, hard to find and hard to take down are the ideal architecture for next-generation warfare.The next phase for Stendr is deployment and getting our systems into the field, inside the institutions that need them, at speed. Michael understands what it takes to move technology from an engineering environment into real-world defence operations which is exactly the talent we need at this critical moment of our growth,”

said Aleksander Leonard Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Stendr.

Stendr is building a vertically integrated European defence platform, entering the market with a distributed passive radar network. The company is combining new sensing architectures, software and AI to counter massed aerial threats at scale. Its nodes emit nothing, reading the radio signals already present in the air and detecting the physical disruption caused by anything flying through them, which makes the network hard to find and hard to take down. The approach is designed for the conditions now defining the war in Ukraine, where centralised, high-value air defence systems represent single points of failure.

The appointment is part of a broader period of accelerated hiring at Stendr, which has added senior engineering talent across hardware, software, and embedded systems in recent months. Earlier this year, Stendr raised a $5.4 million pre-seed round, one of the largest in Nordic defence technology to date.