The Munich startup’s airborne Sentinel system has been tested in Ukraine and alongside US and UK forces, now it’s planning a 2,000-square-metre production facility and quadrupling its headcount.
The cost asymmetry that defines modern drone warfare is by now well documented. In April 2024, Iran launched roughly 300 drones and missiles at Israel. Defenders intercepted most of them, at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 billion. The attacking drones cost a fraction of that to produce.
The same dynamic plays out on a daily basis in Ukraine, where cheap first-person-view drones overwhelm defences that were never designed to handle volume. The strategic implication is straightforward: whoever can field counter-drone systems that are cheap enough to shoot down cheap drones has a meaningful advantage.
That problem is what Alpine Eagle is building for.
On Thursday the Munich-based defence technology startup announced it is scaling production of its Sentinel counter-UAS system as European governments accelerate their search for drone defence capability.
The company plans to open a 2,000-square-metre production facility near Munich for its own-developed interceptors, and has struck a partnership with Dutch UAV manufacturer DeltaQuad to scale the broader Sentinel platform using industrial production capacity within a European supply chain.
Alpine Eagle was founded in 2023 by Jan-Hendrik Boelens, a Dutch aerospace engineer whose CV includes a decade at Airbus Helicopters, where he served as chief engineer on transnational helicopter development programmes, followed by the CTO role at electric air taxi startup Volocopter and then CTO at autonomous UAV company Quantum Systems.
He co-founded Alpine Eagle with Timo Breuer, a scientist with backgrounds at Microsoft Research and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
Sentinel is an airborne counter-drone system, which distinguishes it from most competing approaches that are ground-based. The core system uses a mothership UAV carrying airborne interceptors, smaller drones that can capture hostile targets with nets or destroy them, supported by an AI-powered radar and sensor network.
Operating from altitude means Sentinel is not hindered by terrain that can mask low-flying drones from ground-based radars, and it avoids becoming a stationary target.
The Sentinel-OS software platform is designed to be hardware-agnostic, integrating with both off-the-shelf and bespoke platforms.
The company has been building operational credibility rapidly. The German Bundeswehr became Sentinel’s launch customer in 2024. Alpine Eagle subsequently conducted trials in Ukraine, the only environment in the world where counter-drone systems face sustained pressure from mass attacks under disrupted GPS conditions, and participated in Project Vanaheim, a counter-UAS trial involving the US and UK armed forces.
Ukraine trial participation was confirmed by TechCrunch in March 2025, following the company’s €10.25 million seed round. The company says it has since added three more European customers and expanded into the UK and the Netherlands, where it is now participating in a Dutch defence innovation programme, though those specific customer and programme claims come from Alpine Eagle’s own press materials and have not been independently verified.
The seed round, which closed in March 2025, was led by IQ Capital, with participation from HTGF, Expeditions Fund, and Sentris Capital. General Catalyst and HCVC, which led Alpine Eagle’s earlier pre-seed, also returned. Total funding stands at over €10 million according to the company.
“Defence ministries are increasingly looking for systems that can be delivered quickly and scaled as operational demand grows,” said Jan-Hendrik Boelens, founder and CEO, in a statement. “The reality is that threats facing Europe are higher than they have been for decades and drones are transforming the battlefield faster than traditional defence systems can adapt.”
The broader context is well understood in European defence circles. Ground-based air defence systems designed for Cold War threats, and the missiles used to intercept modern drones, are expensive per engagement. The first-mover advantage belongs to whoever can produce interceptors cheaply enough and in volume large enough to sustain extended operations.
Alpine Eagle’s airborne approach is one of several competing architectures being tested across allied nations; the 2,000-square-metre facility near Munich is an early signal that the company believes it is close enough to production-ready status to start building for scale.
