The war in Ukraine has brought the threat of drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems. Traditional solutions, such as ground-based defenses and cyber warfare, often carry a substantial price tag. However, the rise of inexpensive, first-person-view (FPV) drones, capable of destroying expensive military assets, necessitates more cost-effective alternatives.
“We use inexpensive, mass-producible systems to establish a symmetry against the numerical advantage of cheap strike drones,” explained Jan-Hendrik Boelens, a Dutch entrepreneur and co-founder of Alpine Eagle. Based in Munich, the startup develops Sentinel, a combination of software and hardware designed for cost-efficiency. The Sentinel system takes an airborne approach, unlike ground-based solutions like Hover’s counter-drone turret. It uses modular sensors unhindered by terrain or other obstacles, avoiding becoming a stationary target. Sentinel’s mothership, a sophisticated but non-expendable platform, carries kamikaze interceptors capable of capturing or destroying enemy drones.
While potential applications exist in law enforcement and other sectors, the current geopolitical climate has driven primary demand for this technology within the military. Alpine Eagle has secured the German army as its launch customer, along with other government agencies, and reported seven-digit revenue in its first year of operation. This success helped the company close a €10.25 million (around $10.96 million) seed round, led by British deep tech VC firm IQ Capital.
The recent funding will enable Alpine Eagle to expand its current team of machine learning practitioners and aeronautical engineers, hiring across product, engineering, business development, and sales, bringing its headcount to 40. The British-led investment is strategic, with the United Kingdom identified as a key market for expansion. The demand for the technology extends beyond battlefield applications, encompassing the protection of military bases and critical infrastructure.
Alpine Eagle is part of the rising interest in European defense tech and the sector’s growing appeal to venture capital, particularly in countries experiencing heightened threats. In addition to returning investors General Catalyst and HCVC, their cap table now includes funds from Estonia, Germany, and Poland.
“We were looking for a consortium of European investors that share both the urgency for building [a] European defense tech ecosystem and that are located in key countries,” Boelens stated.
Despite the urgency, Boelens emphasized a deliberate approach to deploying Sentinel in Ukraine. “Our approach there was to make sure that we first have a mature system to deliver to them so that we don’t waste their time with something that’s not working yet. We’ve seen too many startups doing that, and we felt we should only go there once the system is actually doing what it’s supposed to do.”
Following system validation with the German army, Alpine Eagle is now testing Sentinel in Ukraine, engaging with various brigades to identify front-line use cases. One focus has been fiber-optic drones, which use cables instead of radio frequency, making them more difficult to detect or jam. These types of drones create a challenge even for companies like Epirus, a U.S. defense tech startup, who recently secured a $250 million Series D round. Epirus’s flagship product, Leonidas, uses high-powered microwaves. However, Alpine Eagle’s airborne system enables the integration of various sensors, including radar panels, to detect low-flying drones often missed by ground-based systems.
Jamming technology is a two-way street, and AI plays a crucial role in Alpine Eagle’s approach. Data processing occurs onboard the hardware for navigation and data collection, allowing the algorithms to adapt based on real-world observations. A key tactical aspect of Sentinel is its swarming capability, which allows multiple drones to be operated efficiently by a single operator using high levels of automation, and is also a selling point of the latest drone models. Boelens noted that, “We realized that all Western powers have the problem of not having enough soldiers, so we try to build a system where many, many drones can be operated by a single operator by using high automation levels and really promoting the soldier to a mission manager rather than a pilot.”
This article has been updated to correct the round’s stage; it is a seed round, not a Series A.
