The European Defence Agency has announced the results of Stage 1 of its Sentinel Strike Challenge, a prize contest on loitering munitions run through EDA’s Hub for European Defence Innovation (HEDI). Destinus was ranked among the five highest-scoring applicants, selected from more than 140 expressions of interest from across participating EU Member States, and is invited to Stage 2 of the contest.
Stage 2 is an operational experimentation campaign hosted by the Portuguese Army at the Santa Margarida Military Training Area, conducted within EDA’s Operational Experimentation Campaign 2026 and in conjunction with the ARTEX26 exercise, from 28 September to 9 October 2026. Destinus will demonstrate a complete loitering munition system developed and produced in Europe, with operational experience in demanding environments. Military users from EU Member States will assess the competing systems across the full precision strike mission cycle: from mission planning and launch through target detection, engagement, and post-strike assessment, in realistic, degraded, and contested conditions. The five finalists compete for a total Stage 2 prize pool of €1.8 million.
The challenge is not a procurement competition. Its purpose is to generate comparable operational evidence that defence ministries can use when assessing which technologies could contribute to future capabilities. For Destinus, that is precisely the value: European systems evaluated by European military users, in the field, on a common basis and in the same scenarios.
