European Defence Agency Five Finalists for Loitering Munition Challenge

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The European Defence Agency (EDA) has selected five finalists for its Sentinel Strike Challenge. Their loitering munition systems will now advance to field testing under realistic operational conditions during EU OPEX26 in Portugal.

In autumn five European companies will take their technologies to the Santa Margarida military training area in Portugal, to test them during the EU OPEX26. The experimentation will focus on loitering munition systems, a type of attack drone that searches for a target before striking, under controlled, realistic and operationally relevant conditions.

Before reaching Portugal, participating companies were assessed against predefined administrative, technical and award criteria covering aspects such as technical maturity, operational relevance, safety and demonstration feasibility.

The field testing marks the second stage of the European Defence Agency's (EDA) Sentinel Strike Challenge prize contest. The challenge uses a two-stage award procedure that combines competitive evaluation with operational experimentation, extending the assessment beyond written proposals to field testing under the same competition. This approach enables emerging technologies to be evaluated more quickly and on a common basis, providing Member States with comparable operational data on how the different loitering munition systems perform in the same scenarios.

Ready for Stage 2 

EDA has now completed the first stage of the challenge, which attracted more than 140 expressions of interest from organisations across Europe. Following a competitive evaluation, the five highest-ranked submissions came from Helsing (Germany), Destinus (Netherlands), C-Astral (Slovenia), UAVision (Portugal) and Spirit Aeronautical Systems (Greece). Each company will receive a €30,000 (approx. 34,000 USD) Stage 1 prize and advance to Stage 2 of the competition.

The remaining companies in the top ten, Renegade UxS (Denmark), Robotto (Denmark), Cerberon Defence Systems (Germany), THALES LAS (France) and ALTUS LSA (Greece), will each receive a €10,000 (approx. 11,000 USD) Stage 1 prize.

For the five selected companies, the competition now moves to the field, where they will compete for a total of €1,800,000 (approx. 2,000,000 USD) in prizes. During the EU OPEX26 operational experimentation campaign in Portugal, their systems will be tested under controlled, realistic and contested operational conditions. Military users from EU Member States will assess not only whether the technologies work, but also how they perform across the full mission cycle, how resilient they are under operational conditions, and how they compare when tested under the same scenarios.

The successful selection for the second stage of the challenge does not mean that the technologies are ready to be purchased or deployed. It means they have earned the chance to be tested under more demanding conditions. The challenge is not a procurement competition and does not promise contracts to its winners. Its purpose is to generate evidence that defence ministries can use when deciding which technologies could contribute to future capabilities.

Testing before investing 

While the competition will identify the highest-performing systems, its broader objective is to generate practical lessons for future defence innovation. By involving military users throughout the testing process, the challenge aims to improve how emerging technologies are evaluated before they are considered for future capability development.

Recent conflicts have turned loitering munitions into a rapidly evolving military capability, with technological advances and battlefield adaptations often outpacing traditional development cycles. As new systems enter the market and technologies evolve at an unprecedented pace, understanding how they perform in realistic operational conditions has become increasingly important. The results of the experimentation in Portugal will determine the overall winners of the Sentinel Strike Challenge, who are expected to be announced in 2027.