June 11 – Europe’s largest aerospace group Airbus plans to work with French counter-drone startup Alta Ares to \u200chelp meet demand for air defence systems, under a \u200cnon-binding deal made public on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Drones have proved highly strategic in the \u200bUkraine war, but increasingly threaten European countries as Russia has carried out hostile overflights and airspace violations, prompting the European Commission to present a plan in February to counter drone threats across \u200cthe European Union.<\/p>\n
Alta Ares \u2060was among the startups invited by the French presidency to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in \u2060November 2025. It said on Tuesday it had raised \u20ac50 million ($58 million) in its second funding round.<\/p>\n
The company develops ammunition equipped with \u200bAI-based software \u200bto intercept and destroy drones.<\/p>\n
In \u200ba statement from both \u200ccompanies on Thursday, Airbus said it signed a memorandum of understanding through its Airbus Defence and Space division, with the startup to “cooperate on the development and integration of European counter-drone solutions”.<\/p>\n
Already used by Ukrainian forces against Russian drones, Alta Ares says \u200cits drone interceptors are also deployed \u200bin the Middle East and in \u200bAsia.<\/p>\n
Airbus plans to integrate \u200bits military command software Fortion IBMS and its \u200cair and missile defence management \u200bsystem, the Fortion \u200bSAMOC suite, with Alta Ares’ counter-drone systems.<\/p>\n
The group will also contribute to the development of Alta Ares’ two interceptors, \u200bBlack Bird, which \u200ctargets cruise missiles, and X-Locks, designed to counter drones \u200bsuch as the Iranian-designed Shahed.<\/p>\n
($1 = 0.8664 euros)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Florence \u200bLo\u00e8ve; editing by Barbara Lewis)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"June 11 – Europe’s largest aerospace group Airbus plans to work with French counter-drone startup Alta Ares to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[16438,90,16439,1797,9],"class_list":["post-22074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-airbus","tag-air-defence-systems","tag-airbus","tag-ares","tag-european-commission","tag-european-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}