German counter-drone defence technology company Alpine Eagle and Latvian autonomous systems startup Origin Robotics have signed an integration memorandum of understanding (MOU). Origin Robotics’ Blaze interceptor will soon work within Alpine Eagle’s Sentinel counter-UAS system.
The deal was announced Tuesday at Eurosatory, the defence exposition taking place in Paris this week, where Origin had big customer news earlier in the day. It has signed a procurement deal with France, which will be buying Blaze for its armed forces after a competitive process in search of an interceptor drone system. The deal is being done by way of a partnership with French integrator DSV, which will be manufacturing Blaze in France itself and delivering the first devices “within weeks.” No financial terms have been disclosed.
Alpine Eagle has designed Sentinel to be an all-in-one solution for detecting and taking down unfriendly drones and other smaller airborne threats, but (like others in the UAS sphere) it has also pitched its solution and very “modular” and this is where Blaze will be fitting in.
Alpine Eagle produces three UAVs of its own — the flagship Sentinel fixed-wing UAV (“the mothership,” which has both sensors and a launch platform); the Sparrowhawk, an air-launched interceptor platform; and the Sentry, a multirotor UAS. It also produces an operating system, Sentinel OS, and command-and-control software to manage the fleet.
Origin Robotics’ Blaze fills an important gap in that range, particularly in combat environments. Blaze — a NATO-codified, radar-guided autonomous interceptor drone system — has built-in safety protocols and operator-override capabilities. It also has a self-destruct protocol that triggers if its geofence is breached, communication is lost, or another critical failure occurs.
Alpine Eagle had been looking for ground launched interceptors to combine with its layered sensor-to-effector counter-drone capability, and Origin Robotics Blaze fit the bill, said Jan-Hendrik Boelens co-founder and CEO of Alpine Edge, speaking to Resilience Media ahead of his trip to Eurosatory.
“We found a world-class interceptor with a team that resonates very well with our values,” he added.
Origin Robotics’ Blaze stood out to Boelens, he said, because of a “combination of industrial scale performance of the product and a supply chain that has been thought through rather than at a prototypical stage,” he continued. “It’s the actual ability to hit something versus ‘having a warhead available.'”
Under the agreement, the companies will focus first on technical integration, customer demonstrations and operational validation, while establishing a pathway towards future local manufacturing of Blaze in Germany.
It’s a mutually-beneficial deal, with both companies expanding the surface area of how they can engage with future and current customers.
Providing their devices within a larger offering that has already been worked out, not left to the customer to sort, with the costs and time and mishaps that might come with that. Aside from that, the C-UAS market is a very crowded one at the moment — witness in France itself the unicorn Harmattan also building C-UAS — making partnerships between multiple players an even more likely evolution.
In addition to France, Origin’s existing customers include Latvia, Belgium and Estonia. Alpine Eagle counts Germany, the UK, Holland and the US among its users. Both have also had equipment tested and used in Ukraine.
“The future of drone defence depends on combining the right sensors, software and effectors. No single system can solve the challenge alone,” said Agris Kipurs, co-founder and CEO of Origin Robotics, in a statement.
Both Boelens and Kipurs agree on a fundamental aspect of how defence and resilience need to take shape in Europe now and in the future: partnerships like the one they have formed are going to be critical going forward.
“We have to go away from the idea of national champions,” Kipurs told Resilience Media in an interview earlier this year. “‘Champions’ need to be European, formations that are geographically or politically aligned. For example the Nordics doing joint procurement is the right approach. We can’t have 27 champions in Europe. If we do that, no one gets to scale and scale is important … not just about the price point but the ability to invest in R&D. That flywheel needs to continue to spin.”
Boelens cited a recent development that highlighted the predicament, as he sees it, in the development of new technology and new products.
“I think we’ve seen that over the last couple of days, with essentially the US pulling the licence of Anthropic from Europe overnight,” he said — a situation that has caught Europe out since it does not have a home-grown replacement. Resources are finite, and so in Europe the best way ahead is to dedicate them to building one thing for many, not many doing the same one thing.
“It really drives the message home that we can talk all we want about European resilience, but if in practice that means every country supporting their local national industry, duplicating what all the other 27 countries have already done, then we are going to stay in this situation,” he said.
If we want to move the needle, he added, then we need to start “implementing Europe rather than talking about Europe – even after more than four years of war in Ukraine, European countries are not able to think beyond their national interests most of the time, and I think that has been a classic problem in the past, and it is still a problem, and it does make me wonder what needs to happen before people actually start to think about the bigger picture.”
He believes that the solution will have to come from industry.
“I think companies like ours will have to figure out how to operate in that environment, despite politics that are leaning towards a national agenda,” he said.
Both companies can be found at Eurosatory 2026 this week.
