In early November 2025, unidentified drones flew repeated sorties over Kleine-Brogel Air Base in northeastern Belgium, a NATO facility that houses American nuclear weapons. Within days, drone sightings forced closures at Brussels Airport, Charleroi and Liege, stranding hundreds of passengers overnight and prompting dozens of flight cancellations. Belgium's defence minister confirmed the flights were coordinated and resembled a spying operation. Belgian security services later concluded they had no reasonable doubt that Russia was behind the campaign.
Belgium had virtually no counter-drone capability. It called in specialist teams and equipment from Germany, the United Kingdom and France. The episode exposed a gap that most European governments had discussed in abstract terms but done little to fill. Within weeks, Belgium's Ministry of Defence allocated €50 million for counter-drone systems and began placing orders.
The Belgian crisis was simply the most visible example of a problem spreading across the continent. The proliferation of cheap, capable drones has outpaced every European country's ability to detect and destroy them. What has followed is the fastest industrial ramp-up in European defence in decades. The European counter-drone market, projected at roughly $1.24 billion in 2025, is expected to reach more than $4 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of 27.5%, according to MarketsandMarkets.
Seeing them first
Before you can shoot down a drone, you need to find it. Small commercial drones fly low, slow and with minimal radar cross-sections, making them difficult to distinguish from birds. Conventional military radars were never designed to track them.
Robin Radar Systems, a Dutch company that spun out of the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), spent years solving exactly this problem for a different customer: airports trying to prevent bird strikes. That expertise translated directly to drone detection. The company's IRIS radar can switch between 5-kilometre and 12-kilometre detection ranges and mount on a vehicle or a tripod. More than 200 of these systems are now deployed in Ukraine, donated by several European countries with the Netherlands as the primary contributor. In December 2025, the Dutch Ministry of Defence signed a contract for 100 more IRIS radars to protect domestic airspace, with the first 50 delivered by the end of the year.
On the personal-protection end, Danish company MyDefence has built a wearable drone detector called Wingman. More than 2,000 units have been shipped to Ukrainian forces, where soldiers wear them to get early warning of incoming FPV drones. The company's revenue roughly doubled in 2024 compared to the previous year, and in late February 2026 it opened a US production facility in Oklahoma City to serve growing NATO demand. Robin Radar and MyDefence are already profitable and scaling production, a sign that detection is the mature end of the counter-drone stack. Destroying the drone once you have found it is where the real industrial race is being run.
Why jamming is losing the race
Electronic warfare was the first answer. RF jammers can disrupt the radio link between a drone operator and the aircraft, forcing it to land or return home. Early in the war in Ukraine, this worked. But drones adapted faster than the jammers could keep up.
In the spring of 2024, fibre-optic guided drones appeared on the battlefield. These aircraft trail a thin cable during flight, transmitting video and receiving commands through the fibre rather than over radio frequencies, making them immune to RF jamming by design. By January 2025, Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi confirmed that fibre-optic FPV drones with ranges of 20 kilometres had entered service, with more than 20 certified models produced by 11 Ukrainian companies. Russia deployed them too, hitting targets in Kramatorsk more than 19 kilometres behind the front lines.
At the same time, AI-guided autonomous drones began reducing their dependence on any control link at all. In May 2025, Ukraine's Minister for Digital Transformation announced AI-guided FPV drones launched from mothership carriers, aircraft that can find and engage targets without a human in the loop. Against a fibre-optic or autonomous drone, a jammer has no radio signal to disrupt.
This technological evolution explains why European defence investment is now flowing overwhelmingly toward kinetic interceptors, small and cheap guided projectiles that physically destroy incoming drones. A commercial FPV drone costs a few hundred euros while a surface-to-air missile costs hundreds of thousands, and the economics of that gap drive everything else in the sector. The entire counter-drone industry is a race to close it, building interceptors cheap enough to fire by the dozen at swarms of expendable drones.
The European companies tackling this problem are taking strikingly different approaches. What they share is youth. Most were founded after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and nearly all have moved from concept to funded production in under 3 years.
Frankenburg Technologies in Estonia is building what may be the smallest anti-drone missile in production. The Mark I is about 65 centimetres long, uses a solid-fuel rocket motor to reach speeds above 1,000 kilometres per hour and can engage targets at ranges up to 2 kilometres and altitudes up to 1.5 kilometres, going from concept to live firing in 13 months. In January 2026, test footage showed a Mark I intercepting a Shahed-type drone. Frankenburg raised a €30 million Series A led by Plural and SmartCap and is planning production at facilities in Germany and the UK, each targeting more than 100 missiles per day, plus a separate partnership with Poland's PGZ for a facility capable of up to 10,000 missiles annually. It has signed a memorandum of understanding with Babcock for a containerised maritime launcher.
Tytan Technologies in Munich takes a different path: an autonomous interceptor drone rather than a missile. The system engages targets beyond 15 kilometres at speeds over 250 kilometres per hour, weighs about 5 kilograms at launch and uses computer-vision guidance to hit targets kinetically. In late 2025, Germany's defence procurement agency BAAINBw selected Tytan for a multi-hundred-million-euro Bundeswehr programme. The company raised a €30 million Series A co-led by Armira and the NATO Innovation Fund and targets production of 3,000 interceptors per month by the end of 2026. Bavaria's Minister President Markus Söder attended the opening of Tytan's Munich headquarters in January 2026.
Munich is becoming something of a kinetic interceptor cluster. Alpine Eagle, also based in the city, is building Sentinel, an air-to-air counter-drone system rather than a ground-based one. Founded in 2023, it uses AI and edge computing to detect, classify and intercept drones from the air. The company raised €10.25 million in seed funding from IQ Capital in March 2025, has the German army as its launch customer and has tested in real conditions in Ukraine. Its team grew from 12 people in 2024 to 50 in 2026, with plans to reach 100.
Origin Robotics in Latvia built the BLAZE autonomous interceptor after the 2022 invasion. It is the first NATO-codified autonomous interceptor drone with a STANAG-compliant warhead. In February 2026, deliveries began to Latvia, Belgium and Estonia, making them among the first European countries to field a domestically produced autonomous drone interception system. Belgium selected BLAZE as part of its €50 million emergency counter-drone package.
In Stockholm, Nordic Air Defence is building the Kreuger 100XR, a carbon-fibre interceptor about 30 centimetres long and weighing roughly half a kilogram. It flies above 350 kilometres per hour and uses an onboard seeker for night operations, with a radio-silent mode designed for environments saturated with electronic warfare. The company has a partnership with Volvo Defence to integrate the system into vehicle protection pods for delivery in 2026 and a Polish subsidiary working with WB Group and Tantalit.
Fiducial, a Delft-based company in the Netherlands, is approaching the problem from the software side. Rather than building its own interceptor hardware, it develops autonomous interception software designed to guide existing drones against long-range attack drones like the Shahed. The company is working with both the Dutch and Ukrainian Ministries of Defence and has a goal of deploying software to enable 20,000 autonomous interception drones per month with Ukrainian partners.
Other players are filling different niches. DefSecIntel Solutions in Estonia has built EIRSHIELD, a modular counter-drone platform that integrates technologies from multiple European companies, and has partnered with Origin Robotics on Drone Wall, an EU cross-border drone defence system. Near Paris, EGIDE, founded in 2025 by former MBDA engineers, raised an €8 million seed round in March 2026 from Expeditions, Eurazeo and Heartcore Capital to develop electric-propulsion interceptors and a hardware-agnostic software platform called Mystique.
No single technical approach has pulled ahead yet. Missiles, interceptor drones, air-to-air platforms and autonomous software are all attracting serious capital, a sign that the market is young enough to support multiple bets. The European counter-drone sector is expanding at 27.5% annually, and every month brings new contracts, new test results and new production commitments.
For anyone considering a career in European defence technology, this is a rare chance to build an industry rather than join one. The companies profiled here are hiring across engineering, software, autonomy, production and programme management. Many are growing their teams by multiples rather than percentages. DefenceJobs.org tracks more than 30 counter-drone and electronic warfare companies across the continent, from the Baltics to Scandinavia to France. Most of these companies did not exist 3 years ago. The work they are doing will shape European security for decades.
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