The Munich startup’s airborne Sentinel system has been tested in Ukraine and with US and UK forces, now it plans a 2,000 square meter production facility and quadruples its workforce.
The cost asymmetry that defines modern drone warfare is now well documented. In April 2024, Iran fired about 300 drones and missiles at Israel. Defenders seized most of them, with an estimated value of more than $1.5 billion. It costs a fraction of that to produce attack drones.
The same dynamic plays out daily in Ukraine, where cheap first-person-view drones overwhelm defenses never designed to handle volume. The strategic implication is clear: whoever can use anti-drone systems cheap enough to shoot down cheap drones has a meaningful advantage.
This challenge is set for Alpine Eagle.
The Munich-based defense technology startup announced Thursday that it is expanding production of its Sentinel anti-UAS system as European governments accelerate their pursuit of drone defense capabilities.
company He plans to open a production facility on an area of 2000 square meters Near Munich, it has partnered with Dutch UAV manufacturer DeltaQuad to expand its Sentinel platform to a wider range, using industrial manufacturing capacity in its European supply chain for capture devices it has developed.
Alpine Eagle was founded in 2023 by Dutch aerospace engineer Jan-Hendrik Boelens, whose resume spans ten years at Airbus Helicopters, where he served as chief engineer of multinational helicopter development programs, followed by the role of CTO at electric air taxi startup Volocopter, and later as CTO at autonomous company UAV Systems.
He co-founded Alpine Eagle with Timo Breuer, a scientist with experience at Microsoft Research and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
Sentinel is an air-to-air counter-drone system that differentiates it from most competing ground-based approaches. The core system uses a mothership UAV carrying air-to-air interceptors, supported by a network of artificial intelligence-powered radar and sensors, capable of netting or destroying enemy targets.
Operating from a height means the Sentinel is not obstructed by terrain that can hide low-flying drones from ground-based radars and avoids becoming a stationary target.
The Sentinel-OS software platform is designed to be hardware-agnostic, integrating with both off-the-shelf and custom platforms.
The company is rapidly developing operational reliability. The German Bundeswehr became Sentinel’s launch customer in 2024. Alpine Eagle later conducted tests in Ukraine. It is the only environment in the world where counter-drone systems face sustained pressure from mass attacks under conditions of compromised GPS, and participated in Project Vanaheim, an anti-UAS test involving the US and UK armed forces.
He attended the Ukrainian court Verified 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 is currently expanding into the UK and the Netherlands, where it is participating in a Dutch defense innovation programme, although these specific customer and program claims come from Alpine Eagle’s own press materials and have not been independently confirmed.
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, who led Alpine Eagle’s previous seeding, are also back. According to the company, the total funding is more than 10 million euros.
“Departments of Defense are looking for systems that can be delivered quickly and at scale as operational demands increase” Founder and CEO Jan-Hendrik Boelens said in a statement. “The reality is that the threats facing Europe are higher than they have been in decades, and drones are changing the battlefield faster than traditional defense systems can adapt.”
The wider context is well understood in European defense circles. Ground-based air defense systems designed for Cold War threats and missiles used to intercept modern drones are expensive per engagement. First-mover advantage belongs to those who can manufacture the cutters cheaply enough and in large enough quantities to sustain long-term operations.
The Alpine Eagle aerial approach was one of several competing architectures tested in the Allied Powers; The 2,000-square-meter facility near Munich is the first signal that the company believes it is close enough to production-ready to begin scale construction.
