The real opportunity isn’t building more drones. It’s building what every drone depends on.

The Netherlands will not win on assembly volume. It can win on the layers every drone producer depends on.

Europe’s security posture has shifted, and the spending follows: the Netherlands has committed to 3.5% of GDP on direct defense and 1.5% on defense related infrastructure. Nowhere is the change clearer than in drones. As HCSS researchers Ron Stoop and Rens van Dam note in ESB, unmanned systems are now linked to most battlefield casualties in Ukraine, which alone produced over a million FPV drones in a year. European producers including Helsing, Orqa and Tekever are racing to match that, and the Dutch DroneBoost strategy joins the push. Yet by Rabobank’s estimate, fewer than a third of the EU’s military drones are actually built in Europe. Demand is outpacing sovereign supply.

The same analysis is clarifying: the Netherlands won’t win on high volume assembly, but it holds the harder-to-copy layers: photonics, composites, sensing and embedded software. Delft sits at the center of that. Vydar, a Tenzing Alpha portfolio company on the TU Delft campus, builds compact AI modules that let drones navigate when GPS is jammed, running AI on the platform itself, optimized for size, weight, power and cost, while reducing dependence on non-European suppliers. That is sovereignty at the component level.

Europe’s next strategic advantage will be created long before final assembly.

Our view at Tenzing Alpha is that the gap won’t close through factories alone. It closes upstream, in the autonomy, sensing and materials that determine whether a system works and whether it can be built without a critical foreign dependency. As a very early-stage fund, that’s where we focus: patient pre-seed capital, dual-use commercial pull, and real connections between founders and European value chains.

Tenzing Alpha backs founders in dual-use technologies. We climb alongside the companies we build, and we’ll have more to share soon.