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The war in Ukraine has brought drones to the forefront of modern warfare, creating a surge in demand for counter-drone systems.
However, legacy solutions to counter drones, such as ground-based defense systems and cyber warfare, often come with a hefty price tag. For German startup Alpine Eagle, these solutions fall short: When now-ubiquitous $500 first-person view (FPV) drones have the capacity to destroy multi-million dollar tanks, cost-effective answers are needed.
“We use inexpensive, mass-producible systems to establish a symmetry against the numerical advantage of cheap strike drones,” Dutch entrepreneur Jan-Hendrik Boelens told TechCrunch. Munich-based Alpine Eagle, which he cofounded in 2023, develops Sentinel, a mix of software and hardware focused on cost efficiency.
Unlike ground-based competing solutions, such as Hover’s counter-drone turret, Sentinel is airborne, with modular sensors that aren’t hindered by terrain and other obstacles, while avoiding becoming a stationary target.
Its mothership, which is sophisticated, but not meant to be expendable, carries kamikaze interceptors that also help it do more than detecting threats or jamming them: They can either capture objects with nets or destroy hostile drones altogether.
While potential applications exist in law enforcement and other sectors, the current geopolitical climate has driven demand for this technology primarily in the military. The Munich-based startup secured the German army as its launch customer, in addition to other government agencies, and said it achieved seven-digit revenues in the first 12 months of operation.
This helped it close a €10.25 million Series A round (around $10.96 million) led by British deep tech VC firm IQ Capital. The new funding will help the startup expand its current team of machine learning practitioners and aeronautical engineers, with new hires across product, engineering, business development, and sales bringing its headcount to 40.
The fact that the round is led by a British VC firm is no coincidence, as the startup will have the U.K. as a key market in its expansion. That’s also because its market goes beyond battlefields, with recent events also highlighting the need to protect military bases and broader infrastructure.
Still, there’s no doubt that Alpine Eagle is part of the rise of European defense tech, and of VC interest in the sector, especially in countries that feel the most at threat.
In addition to returning investors General Catalyst and HCVC, its cap table now also 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 said.
Despite this sense of urgency, Boelens didn’t want to rush Sentinel’s entry into 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.”
After validating its system with the German army, it is now testing its system in Ukraine and talking to different brigades that helped identify use cases in the front line. One is fiber optic drones; using cables instead of radio frequency makes them harder to detect or jam.
Drones that are immune to RF interference can be a challenge even for Epirus, the U.S. defense tech startup co-founded by Joe Lonsdale that just raised a $250 million Series D, and whose flagship product Leonidas beams high-powered microwaves.
In contrast, Alpine Eagle’s airborne system can integrate various sensors including radar panels to detect low-flying drones that often evade ground-based systems.
Jamming goes both ways, though. That’s one of the aspects in which Alpine Eagle is using AI, with data processing done onboard the hardware itself for navigation purposes, as well as data collection in order to retrain its algorithms “to have more adaptive tactics based on what they’ve actually perceived in reality.”
One key tactical aspect of Sentinel is swarming, which is also a selling point of the latest drone models from German defense tech company Helsing. Applying it to counter drone strategies follows the same logic of limiting costs and casualties, with modern warfare that is increasingly unmanned.
“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,” Boelens said.
