Alpine Eagle Sentinel
Alpine Eagle is the airborne outlier of Europe's counter-drone wave — a Munich startup whose Sentinel system puts the whole kill chain in the sky: a reusable "mothership" drone that flies high, carries interceptor drones, and hunts hostile drones from above rather than from a ground launcher.
Counter-drone warfare, moved into the sky — Alpine Eagle is the outlier of Europe's interceptor-startup wave: where everyone else launches the interceptor from the ground, this Munich company puts the whole kill chain in the air. Its Sentinel system is a reusable "mothership" drone that flies high, carries smaller interceptor drones, spots hostile drones with its own airborne radar and AI, and sends its chasers to net or ram them — from above, where terrain hides nothing and the sensor is not a stationary target. The Bundeswehr is its launch customer; Ukraine has trialed it in combat. It is the airborne answer to a problem everyone else is solving from the ground.
Overview
Alpine Eagle is a Munich defense-tech startup (founded 2023) whose product, Sentinel, is the airborne member of Europe's 2026 affordable-interceptor wave — and its most conceptually distinct. Where the Tytan, Frankenburg Mark 1, Sting and Merops systems launch an effector from the ground, hand or vehicle, Sentinel puts sensing, command and interceptors all in the air: a sophisticated, reusable "mothership" UAV flies at altitude carrying airborne interceptor drones, uses an AI-driven radar and electro-optical sensor suite to detect low, fast drones that ground radars miss, and dispatches its chasers to capture hostile drones with nets or destroy them kinetically — all orchestrated by the hardware-agnostic Sentinel-OS software so one operator runs a defensive swarm as a "mission manager, not pilot." The pitch is the airborne layer's advantages: a bird's-eye line of sight unobstructed by terrain, mobility (no stationary launcher to target), wide-area coverage, and "offensive" reach to hunt enemy ISR drones near or behind the front. Founded by ex-Airbus/Volocopter/Quantum Systems engineer Jan-Hendrik Boelens with sensor-fusion scientist Timo Breuer, Alpine Eagle has the German Bundeswehr as its launch customer (operational trials from 2024), has trialed Sentinel with Ukrainian forces, and raised a €10.25 million seed (2025). The honest caveats, as with every startup in this section: nearly all performance specs are undisclosed or company-claimed, there is no independently verified intercept tally, and a circulating "APKWS rockets / hundreds of intercepts" figure is a conflation with the VAMPIRE system — not Sentinel, whose effectors are interceptor drones.
Development
Alpine Eagle was founded in Munich in 2023 to build airborne counter-drone defense, its initial use case the low, fast FPV drones that ground radars struggle to catch, per TechCrunch. Its founders are Jan-Hendrik Boelens (CEO — formerly chief engineer at Airbus Helicopters, then CTO at Volocopter and Quantum Systems) and Timo Breuer (sensor fusion — ex-Microsoft Research and Fraunhofer). The Bundeswehr became its launch customer in 2024, taking the first Sentinel systems for operational trials, and the company reported seven-figure revenue in its first year. In March 2025 it closed a €10.25 million seed round led by UK deep-tech VC IQ Capital (with HTGF, Expeditions Fund, Sentris, General Catalyst and HCVC), deliberately spanning a UK–Germany–Poland–Estonia–France cap table. Through 2025 it trialed Sentinel with the Armed Forces of Ukraine in combat environments (company framing) and in Project VANAHEIM, a joint UK–US counter-UAS exercise, and opened a UK office, per defence-industry.eu. In March 2026 it announced a production scale-up — a 2,000 m² facility near Munich, a partnership with the Netherlands' DeltaQuad to integrate Sentinel with the DeltaQuad Evo platform for EU-supply-chain scale, a Dutch defense-innovation programme, and a claimed three additional European customers (unverified), per TNW. At Eurosatory in June 2026 it signed an MoU with Latvia's Origin Robotics to integrate that firm's BLAZE radar-guided interceptor into Sentinel — adding a ground-launched layer to its airborne one. As of mid-2026 total disclosed funding remains the >€10 million seed and pre-seed; no Series A has been announced.
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