The era of France’s main exports being wine and cheese may be coming to an end, at least if Alta Ares has anything to do with it.
On Thursday, the French counter-drone software company, in partnership with an undisclosed Ukrainian startup, announced it had kicked off mass production of its X-Wing interceptor drones for Ukrainian frontline forces at a secret facility in France.
The startup, founded just last year, is planning to reach a production target of 400 “ITAR and China-free” X-Wings by next year, according to French outlet Le Point. The interceptors will be built at an Alta Ares facility in France, but they plan to produce some of the components in Ukraine.
The company told Tectonic that the production is “tied to NATO and EU-related contracts,” but couldn’t elaborate due to confidentiality requirements.
Field-tested: Alta Ares’ software and X-Wing are already in use in Ukraine, and air defense units are clearly eager to get their hands on more. There’s a good reason for that:
- The X-Wing is a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) interceptor drone designed to take out the Shahed-style drones that have saturated Ukrainian air defense systems. It’s been mainly used at night.
- It’s powered by Alta Ares’ Pixel Lock AI-based autonomous terminal guidance software, which locks onto targets without requiring any human intervention.
- Alta Ares’ AI software also processes imagery from drone feeds to spot and geolocate military targets in real time.
- Earlier this year, they won the NATO Innovation Challenge for successfully detecting, intercepting, and neutralizing a glide bomb.
“Without AI, interceptor drones have a success rate of between 35 and 45%,” Alta Ares CEO Hadrien Canter told Le Point. “With it, they reach up to 65%, and we hope to reach 75% by 2026, but we also need more radars to cover the gaps in the network.”
Born in the battle: The X-Wing is far from Alta Ares’ first rodeo in Ukraine. The company claims dual citizenship and has been developing its tech in Ukraine since its inception.
“Alta Ares is a French company,” Canter told Tectonic in an interview in July, “but we first started to work in Ukraine, where we developed computer vision algorithms for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
Along with the unnamed Ukrainian company, other startups are picking up on that battlefield validation. Alta Ares has also partnered with US integration startup Picogrid, whose CEO, Zane Mountcastle, told Tectonic that Alta Ares is “exceptional because the technology they built and are building on is derived from data collected from the battlefield in Ukraine.”
Frontline friends: Alta Ares, with the Ukrainian startup, is also developing another bigger and badder interceptor called the Black Bird, built to take out Russia’s increasingly advanced Geran-5 jet-powered drones. The Black Bird, according to Intelligence Online, has a turbojet engine for long-range interception of fast-moving targets and will be tested in Ukraine in the near future. Alta Ares told Tectonic that the Black Bird is “designed to intercept third-generation Shahed drones traveling at speeds exceeding 500 km/h.”
While a whole bunch of defense startups on both sides of the pond claim testing in Ukraine, Alta Ares’ tech was born there. Their approach is “to listen to the needs of the military, and based on that, develop tailor-made solutions for them and then sell them,” Canter told Tectonic.
With the X-Wing production, Black Bird development, and deepening relationship with both Ukraine and partners on NATO’s eastern front, Alta Ares is on its way to make “Made in France” mean missiles, not merlot. Oui oui.
This article has been updated to include comment from Alta Ares on X-Wing production