Dobbelgänger Oy: The VTT Spin-Off Printing Phantom Tanks for Europe

Analysis as of 21 August 2025.

Battlefield deception is as old as war itself, but in Oulu a team of eleven people is rebuilding it around printed electronics. Dobbelgänger Oy was incorporated in 2022 as a spin-out of VTT, Finland's applied-research institute, and it makes portable decoys designed to register as genuine vehicles on the instruments an adversary actually uses — infrared cameras, radar (including synthetic-aperture systems) and the human eye. The product is not an inflatable silhouette. It is a layered foil: flexible substrates carrying printed heating grids that recreate the heat output of the vehicle, plus metallised structures that return a radar echo consistent with the object being imitated. A few soldiers can put one up in roughly ten to thirty minutes with no tooling, and the whole thing runs off something as modest as a car battery.

The science behind the company has a long paper trail. Chief executive Terho Kololuoma spent more than twenty years at VTT working on printed electronics before founding the firm; together with Dr. Arttu Huttunen he presented the adaptive-decoy concept in an invited SPIE paper in 2021, work that credited support from MATINE — the scientific board advising Finland's defence ministry — and the Academy of Finland. The intellectual property followed the researchers out of the institute. A European patent covering the multispectral target device, EP 4279858 B1, was granted in 2023, with a matching US grant (11,604,049 B2), and further filings cover a switchable micro-antenna array for shaping radar returns and a roll-to-roll method for producing the functional layers at industrial throughput.

Commercial traction so far is early-stage but datable. In June 2024 the company took first place at Pitch Finland DefSec, a competition co-organised by the Finnish Defence Forces, collecting a €100,000 commitment from FiBAN angel investors. The same year it passed through Connect2Scale, an EU-backed accelerator. Prototypes have been flown against drone sensors and held up as convincing beyond fifty metres, and units have been trialled in harsh Finnish weather — evidence consistent with a technology-readiness level in the six-to-seven band, demonstrated in a relevant environment but not yet fielded by any armed force.

Why does a lightweight printed-foil trick matter strategically? Ukraine has settled the argument about decoys: Kyiv Post reported in August 2024 on a Czech-built inflatable replica of an M270 launcher absorbing a Russian missile strike, and Inflatech — the firm behind it — became one of the conflict's quiet industrial success stories. But inflatables are the simple end of the spectrum, and Europe's broader record is uncomfortable: an analysis by the Centre for Future Generations put 78% of EU defence procurement in 2022–23 with suppliers outside the Union. A Finnish company that can print convincing thermal and radar signatures — and manufacture them on European pilot lines such as VTT's PrintoCent facility — speaks directly to that dependency problem, at the precise moment Finland's 2023 NATO accession opened alliance channels to its industrial base.

The open question is scale. Eleven employees, angel money and a prototype fleet do not meet the demand signal coming from NATO's eastern flank, and the firm has so far not been publicly named in any awarded European Defence Fund consortium nor in any DIANA cohort. Meanwhile its founder has already spun the heating technology into a civilian sibling, The Warming Surfaces Company, a reminder that the underlying capability is dual-use and mobile. DFM's 21-page profile works through what the record supports, and the questions it leaves open are the commercial ones: whether the evidence behind the claimed maturity level holds up, and what would move the decoys from trials into an army's inventory; whether an eleven-person firm can reach volume production alone, or the path necessarily runs through a prime such as Patria, Saab or Rheinmetall; whether the patent family genuinely fences off the multispectral niche against imitators; which EU and NATO funding instruments fit the company's next one to two years; and where Dobbelgänger lands today on a measured strategic-autonomy scale — with what it would take to raise the score.