How is the sudden global attention on Greenland changing its economy? 

0:11Hello and welcome to the Entrepreneurs on Monocle Radio, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. Coming up on today's programme, we're exploring two topics that dominated the agenda at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Greenland and European Defence. First, we'll head to Nuke to meet the founder of an adventure travel company offering guided tours in the Arctic wilderness and trying to make the most of the unusual conversations currently focused on his island. When a guy like Donald Trump, one of the most powerful people on Earth, starts talking about a country that has barely been mentioned in the world history, it does something, of course.

0:51Greenland, of course, kind of put on the world map. And later, we'll take a dive into the cold waters of the Baltic Sea for a chat with the CEO of a company behind a NATO-backed underwater drone. We are in a race. We are in a weapons race. So we must not stop. This is The Entrepreneurs with me, Tom Edwards.

1:17You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Now, it's fair to say that Greenlanders would, on the whole, have been happier if US President Donald Trump had never heard of their island, and happier still if he'd never mentioned it. However, becoming the subject of obsession by Earth's most powerful and influential individual does at least attract attention, including from people who might fancy visiting one day. One company operating in Greenland's still underdeveloped tourism space is Raw Arctic, based in Greenland's tiny capital, Nook. Our Andrew Muller visited Raw Arctic while he was in Nook for Monocle and spoke to the CEO and co-founder, Caspar Frank Muller.

1:55Approximately, I would say, three and a half years ago, ISAC, one of the co-founders sitting in there, we got the idea to establish this company called Raw Arctic. And I think for us, it was about merging our hobby with our profession. me myself i have a master degree in innovation and entrepreneurship and teaches business at the university and isaac is an educated arctic adventure guide so he knows his way around these in this nature so we kind of gathered together and thought okay let's let's do something different let's let's spend our lives on something that we really love and that's where we brought rasmus in he's the other co-founder he's a captain on some of our boats and he has a lot of experience with business as well so we were kind of set up for for success let me say that way so we ended up launching the company around one and a half year ago almost two years ago now and it was again with the idea of working with boat operations working with fly fishing because that's that's one of my true passions i really love fly fishing it's a bit of a family thing that i do with my siblings so it started out quite small and then it scaled into being not not only operating here nook but doing travel packages and tours all over greenland so what's different about what raw arctic is doing where did you see a gap in the market that other tour operators and other tourism businesses in greenland weren't operating i think there is quite a big competition in the market when it comes to tourism because i think of course you have the fisheries is like a really a pillar of the economy then you have of course rare with minerals minerals in general and then you have tourism and this is kind of the newest establishment of the greenland economy and that's where we saw an opportunity but again there is a really tough competition in the market but i usually say it's really difficult to buy something that you can't see so that's exactly what we tried to develop and enhance even further and that was to sell greenland and how do you sell it is by being present is by taking these interviews, getting us publicly known.

3:53It's about being effective on social media. It's about having the proper agents and just being an outspoken person, travel around and using your contacts. And I think that was kind of our go-to market strategy to really just get it out there. And we ran a campaign in National Geographic last year that said, not for sale, open for exploring. So we kind of used this entire media momentum to our advantage. Well, I mean, that kind of preempts a question I wanted to ask, which was, have you noticed an uptick in attention over the last year or so, not just from journalists such as ourselves, but from people who all of a sudden are interested in coming to Greenland who may never have thought about going to Greenland before?

4:30Again, when a guy like Donald Trump, one of the most powerful people on earth, start talking about a country that has barely been mentioned in the world history, it does something, of course. Last year, when the first people really started to arrive, not people but mainly journalists greenland was kind of put on the world map and that was a huge opportunity for me especially after raw arctic because we went out and do it did exactly what we do right now talking to journalists so we really got raw arctic out there and it was a huge upside because then people wrote to us hey i read about you in an article i saw you on television and they're like i want to come visit your country and that was just brilliant it had a huge upside and it just made us scale way faster because we were the first contact point we were not that relied on external agents.

5:15But did you notice those inquiries actually leading to an uptick in bookings? Did those people who made those inquiries, and I'm not talking about journalists, I'm talking about actual honest to goodness tourists, did they all actually turn up? Yes, they did. Again, Greenland became a new tourist destination. It's trendy. Again, who doesn't want to go to Greenland before it's taken over by the US? That's at least the statement that people are stating so it's just interests so again now there are a lot of people but my concerns are though and that's also one of the things that we see right now is then like again we're kind of reaching there's a like it's a bit of a double-edged sword because there's so much media momentum there's so much being talked about green and people want to go to greenland but because of what we saw in venezuela it just kind of puts a bit more power behind the words of trump so the concerns right now are a little bit too much so people they decide to to kind of pause their bookings people are waiting to see what happens yes so people saying yeah we have like 20 people on on the waiting list and they're like yeah we want to book but it's a bit too it's not safe enough right now so they kind of just want to wait a bit out wait a few weeks to to hope things are going to settle your sense though that that prospect of the united states actually acting does hang over people on Greenland.

6:34Is it something that Greenlanders are generally actually quite worried about? Yes, of course. Again, in the aftermath of what happened in Venezuela, it seems way more likely that it's going to happen. And of course, when we sit on, like, let's say, critical rare earth mills, we sit on possible shipping routes opening up with the rapid escalation of climate change. Again, we are a geopolitical position that means a lot. and we definitely feel that so we understand why trump wants greenland but again is it going to happen that's where i have my doubts again wars in between nato allies a disturbance of the world autumn i have my doubts that it will happen but our guests are still a bit too hesitant to book because oh they're not sure yet and neither are we how could we know of course we're all concerned we're worried about the future because you're always concerned about something you can predict.

7:29Let's talk a bit about what those tourists who are not put off might experience when they get here. And I'll give you a chance at this point to sell Greenland because there are obviously, if you want to go somewhere in the Arctic North, there are other options, a lot of which are a lot more accessible and a lot of which the United States is not presently threatening to invade, at least as of this recording. What's unique about Greenland? Why should somebody make the effort to come here instead of going to Iceland or Norway or Finland? Let me say it up this way. Just imagine we're 56 ,000 people living on Greenland.

8:05We are one third of the United States square meter wise. Imagine the amount of square meters per person. And that's exactly what we love. Like we are most likely one of the last untouched ecosystems on Earth. When you garden these shores and you start to fish, no one would believe the abundance of wildlife out there. when we go out during summertime we see humpbacks humpback whales we see white-tailed eagles we see reindeers we again it's that craze that when we don't go to the supermarket to buy meat to buy meat no we go out and catch it ourselves because that's what we're always done and when you have an ecosystem that have been untouched in that way everyone can do it so we all survive and bring out of food, if it's fish or it's birds or it's reindeer or moscow, you name it, we can get it ourselves.

8:53And being able to take a step back into history and explore something that unique, I think that's probably one of the most impressive selling points. Assuming, to the extent that we can assume anything, that basically everything stays more or less okay in a geopolitical sense over the next five to 10 years, where do you see this business scaling too because you must also have concerns or Greenlanders in general must have concerns about becoming too popular yes exactly and I think that's exactly where you need to find the right balance I think as a Greenlandic tourist destination as operators over the green I think the most important aspect is to focus on quality or quantity we're an expensive destination and so you need kind of a bit more wealthy people to come here but that is a bit unfortunate because i think everyone should have the possibility in their lives to come and explore greenland but boat chartering helicopter tours flights that's how we get around again you can't drive from a car to another city that's not how it works so it's expensive but again we have to do it in a sustainable way and that's i think that's the most important part because again tourism has such a big potential for the future because it's actually an industry that preserves culture.

10:13It preserves nature. So for us to be disturbing the nature will destroy the fundament of our business because that's exactly what we show to our customers. But for Rural Arctic, if we focus just on your company, what would be the difference between how many customers you're handling annually now and how many you think you would like to be, say, five years from now? Of course, we want to scale. we want to become bigger but it doesn't have to be regarding our operations so one of our business models is that we work as an agent so let's say for example you want to go for a more extreme tour to north side you want to go to Kranak for example which is almost up at the Bidufik airbase again there are some locals there that's that usually won't get tourists but because we can work as an agent and we can set people out to the different areas of Greenland, we create wealth for everyone.

11:08And I think that's really important as of how we want to scale it. Again, I don't see ourselves having operations anywhere else that in New, because this is the place we know. So when we set a guest to South or East or West or North Greenland, who should be the guides? Those that live there, those who grew up in those areas, because that's the authentic experience. I think you should really maintain it that way. And we want to support that development. Everyone should get the benefit of tourism. That was Casper Frank Muller, the CEO and co-founder of Raw Arctic, in conversation with Monocle's Andrew Muller, and I assure you, no relation.

11:43You can find out more about Casper's business by heading to rawarctic.com.

11:57You're listening to The Entrepreneurs. Eugene Timievsky is the CEO of Euroatlas, a European defence technology company building rugged, ready-to-deploy systems for the modern battlefield. From autonomous underwater vehicles to power electronics, surveillance optics and counter-drone technology, Euroatlas designs systems built to operate in the toughest real-world conditions. They're also the creators of Grey Shark, a long-range, high-endurance drone built for operations beneath the sea. I caught up with Eugene just after he'd returned to land, fresh from a new round of trials in the frigid Baltic, and I began by asking him to recap the Euro Atlas story.

12:36So Euro Atlas has been set up 63 years ago to produce power electronics for submarines. So not everybody knows what power electronics is. When you have an engine, then you typically produce AC currents, but sometimes you don't need AC currents, you need DC currents. So you need ACDCs and DCDCs and DCACs. And then you put all that in switchboards, for example. So that is what you need also on a submarine. And we've been doing it for 63 years for the undersea domain. But then we actually expanded that also for surface vessels, like motor starters for helicopters, to give you an example. and then we also put it into jet fighters.

13:23The Jask-Ripin, which is in high demand nowadays, also has a power supply from us in some parts and then also we do it on land-based systems. So for example, we're powering an anti-rocket rocket launcher, which is actually in use in the Ukrainian war. On top of that, we now introduce an autonomous underwater vehicle, which is called the Gray Shark. And that covers roughly what Euroatlas is doing. We are 135 employees. We've grown from 55 employees not long ago to 135. And we're aiming to be 150 by the middle of next year. We have now several locations. We open one up in Kiel now. We have a sea trial space in the north of Germany, near Kiel.

14:16And we also expand it at our site in Bremen. it's an amazing success story and let's talk a little bit more about grey shark and this autonomous underwater vehicle because i think there's been a lot of column inches dedicated to to drones to the aerial unmanned sort of story but underwater is super interesting and super exciting to what extent are some of these auvs eugene now capable of doing work that was actually maybe traditionally done by by manned submarines because there's so much whether that's protecting undersea infrastructure, reducing attacks through mines or sabotage, but also actually countering submarine threats.

14:57But all done autonomously, how fast has the development been in this area to allow autonomous vehicles to actually pick up a lot of that work? Yeah, that's a very good question. And in all fairness and all honesty, what we can now provide, and not just us, I mean other companies as well in the underwater defense autonomous arena, we couldn't do, let's say, five years ago or even three years ago. Autonomy really means computing power. And it is not so much the computing power of the computer itself, you know. It is more like the surroundings of it. That means, you know, the heat, it actually develops.

15:38So you need to have a cooling system and then also the consumption. So five years ago, computers with the computing power and the consumption and, let's say, lower heat dispersion, they probably would have been in the size of, I don't know, you know, a big, big passenger car. And nowadays, you know, we can put it into a standard kind of like framework. And I think that really, really makes the difference. It's really about size. So now having this computing power, an okay heat dispersion and a relatively low power consumption, then you can actually use the sensoric, which is available nowadays, and create true autonomy.

16:30A lot of people say, oh, our system is autonomous. What it really means is so-called waypoint programming or waypoint autonomy. You still have to program the AUV where to go, where to search, what to search, when to dive, when to come up, what to do with the data, and also guide it to come back. What we try to do is we have true autonomy. And that is important because what we've been told by Navy operators is they need three things, speed, endurance and range. So with our advanced propulsion systems utilizing hydrogen, which is just physics, has more than five and a half times more capabilities in these dimensions, we will be in a situation that, like say for a reconnaissance mission, our vehicle can be underwater, not communicating with anybody if required.

17:41for many, many, many weeks. And therefore, you have to be truly autonomous. Nobody is telling it to turn left, right, up, down, go forwards, go to this waypoint or whatever. It has to be truly autonomous. And this is, as I said, is really only being made possible with the development of computing power and also the sensors, the capabilities, the resolution, of sensors and speed of computing also for the sensors and also the capability of fusing sensor data together. So it's a really recent development. Well, talk to me then a little bit about what your expectations are for deployment and, you know, when this hits the water.

18:34Give us an idea of what is that life cycle of testing, exploration, you know, pushing the limits because you know we already said you know that the pace of development in some of the hard tech is so fast what does that mean in terms then of rollout for a product like this yes in a way we are in a much more comfortable situation than for example aerial drones if i were an aerial drone producer i would probably not sleep very well during the night because there's always another startup around the corner, which has something which flies faster, has more autonomy, is cheaper, can carry more payload and so on and so on.

19:15I think one of the admirals who is also in charge of that, even if he is an admiral, he said, my problem is, why should I buy any aerial drones now? Because they are completely obsolete within three months. So luckily, the life cycle, what you're referring to, underwater is not like this. For us, because it's a very highly complex, very harsh environment, the requirements are completely different. Also, the mission profiles are different. Also, the expenditure you have to actually get something going there is much, much higher. I think a life cycle is still in years. Not many years, to be honest.

20:03I think probably within three years, if we were not doing anything with our grey shark, we would be obsolete. I mean, we see this now with one of the pioneers ones. Everybody is bad mouthing them how bad their performance is. I see that completely different. I have great respect for the pioneers of the industry. I mean I don't name it names but there's one from Norway and there's another one from Israel and Germany and for me they are pioneers as they have done a great great job to actually get this going but of course they are completely obsolete in terms of their performance capabilities and they have been developed some years ago so yes three years and you're completely right we don't want to be obsolete in three years time so therefore whenever there is a new sensor which is better wherever there is a new battery which has more performance whenever there is another fuel cell which is a higher efficiency wherever there is a new whatever propeller design we will implement it immediately into our current offering to be always a state of the art of the technology and this is required as you said you know the technology is moving so fast you have to keep the pace of the technology development otherwise you will be out within seconds so that's our approach to counter that let's talk a bit about inspiration obviously people who read about your partnership with evologics will know about this sort of the penguin the shape and form of the penguin obviously this product is called the gray shark but i know also there's kind of influences from across maritime life dolphins and how they move and communicate is part of it talk to me a little bit about how because i think it's really compelling how the sort of natural world and some of these creatures not just in shape and form but also in function and in ambition that's an interesting process isn't it yeah the original founder of evologics where you rightly say you know we have an extremely close partnership and um i hope they are as happy as we are working together with them so far you know it has been really a success so quickly develop something so the originally founder of it he's been a professor of marine biology and he made this for for us now you know famous saying you cannot beat 30 million years of evolution and in more practical terms, he is absolutely right.

22:39So when you put our body into the simulation, it is so much more efficient. I mean, this is just crazy. And you can see it that when you, I'll give you an example, when we have forward-looking multi-beam sonar, horizontal and also vertical, the horizontal one creates a drag of several, you know, percentages in comparison to a completely streamlined body. So the penguin shape, what it's based on, it's really the perfect shape underwater. And we always try very, very hard. That's why we have to cover on the top. And, you know, we're going to get rid of the skids on the side and so on and so on to come close to this perfect shape.

23:26It means more efficiency. And that means more miles or higher speed and longer range. When you compare that to a typical torpedo-shaped AUV, the difference between our shape and the torpedo-shaped one is maybe not so great when you go straight. But the point is that you're an underwater vehicle, and underwater vehicles, they dive and they come up to the surface. And the most energy our competitors lose by not being able to dive and come up in steep percentages. with this body we can act like a jet fighter underwater so we can actually dive at a degree of 85 percent and we can up to the surface by this 85 percent so almost like vertical so the shape is extremely important and then the other thing is we always joke about it but that's reality, the pinguin you're referring to from Evologics is called quatron.

24:33And the quatron has two things. A, it has a shape, and B, it has the basis for everything we talk now. You know, of course, a much more sensor, fewer sensors, but it also has shown capabilities which we just transformed into a bigger body. So the quadroin is actually the mother of the gray shark and we are very happy about this. When we presented it at the Euronaval in Paris last year in November, we had the little quadroin on the bottom. So it was a running joke to say, look, that's the mother of this six and a half meter baby. So that was always a good icebreaker. And just a quick final thought.

25:19What are you most excited about, Eugene? Obviously, there's the ongoing, we talked about the pace of innovation and progress. It must be so exciting, I guess, to see these amazing products actually deployed, doing the work you know they can. That'll be the kind of the next thing on the list. But what are you most excited about at the moment? It is like, you know, you feel like you're giving something to the world. the process of creating something from some electrical current in your brain to actually then physically be able to touch it and seeing it diving you know that was just mind-blowing it was nothing more than an idea and and it was in the beginning a handshake agreement and then 18 months or 15 months later it's actually your baby is actually in the water and and it actually dives.

26:10The first dive, I think, was 21 seconds. And everybody was like screaming and shouting of joy and, you know, wow, you know, the dive, the dive. I mean, it's a joke, you know, now it can do hours and hours and whatever. But that was probably one of the most exciting bits. And then the other thing I believe we should not forget, and unfortunately, I think we forget it more and more. In my personal opinion, we are in the middle of a war. So there are people not far away from us, hundreds of kilometers only. They die and they get wounded and they bleed to death. And every second we talk now and we are there.

26:56And that's our freaking, excuse my French, responsibility to support these brave people as much as we can. And I'm not saying, you know, we developed that for the Ukrainian war. That's all what I'm saying is because we're doing other stuff which goes there. But at the end of the day, this crazy man in Moscow, he will not stop. That's for sure. And 50 % only of the whole military industry spent goes into the Ukrainian war from Russia. Guess where the other 50 % is going to prepare to attack us. and the Baltic Sea where, you know, we'll be doing a lot of our sea tests and trials. That's going to be one critical, you know, arena of conflict.

27:53As early, potentially, than 27, 29, 34. so the other exciting thing is our let's say aggressors in the world and we know who they are they don't stop developing attack autonomous underwater vehicles and they probably have something already in the pipeline so what we are doing is kind of like just counter it yeah it's not like hey we have our product and nobody else has it we are in a race we are in a weapons race we talked about accelerated technology and that will not stop so we must not stop and that also excites me that i have i believe and i hope that myself and and my employees and everybody involved we can contribute a tiny little bit hopefully to make this world a little bit safer producing something of what we're doing.

28:56And that drives not just me, but a lot of people in our company. That was Eugene Timieski, the CEO of Euro Atlas. Find out more, head on over to euroatlas.com.

29:20And that's all for this episode of The Entrepreneurs. We'll be back, of course, at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. You can listen again and find out more about the show at monocle.com. That's where, if you're savvy, you can subscribe to Monocle magazine and ensure you're reading more about better businesses every month. If you'd like to get in touch with the show, do email Laura. You can find her at lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to The Entrepreneurs.

29:54Thank you.