In the Netherlands, Defense wants veto power over the software that flies its drones

Introduction: when software becomes more strategic than a drone

A Friday that changes Dutch doctrine

On Friday, July 3, 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defense announced a three-year strategic partnership with Amsterdam-based company Intelic, worth more than 30 million euros, to build the software architecture that will link all of the Dutch military's drone and unmanned vehicle systems, according to Reuters. This is not a simple hardware order: it is a bet on software before the drones that will use it have even been chosen.

According to Dutch specialist outlet Resilience Media, this approach makes the Netherlands the first country in the world to formalize a "software-first" strategy for acquiring unmanned systems, a complete reversal of the usual logic of buying hardware first and worrying about integration later.

The word that changes everything: "golden share"

But the most striking element of this announcement goes well beyond the amount invested: the Ministry of Defense is exploring the possibility of acquiring a "golden share", a special share carrying veto power, in Intelic'scapital, according to Dutch outlet TW.nl. Such a structure has never before been applied to a Dutch private company.

The exact size of this potential stake reportedly ranges between 20 and 90 million euros, according to reporting by outlet Manorama Online, a gap that shows just how much the final structure of the deal remains under negotiation between the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Finance.

Intelic, the small Amsterdam company that became a national strategic asset

From Avalor AI to Intelic: a startup in full transformation

Intelic, formerly known as Avalor AI, is an Amsterdam-based company that develops command and control software for military drones, according to Dutch outlet Paraat. The company changed its name in spring 2026, at the same time it launched its BASE platform, a digital marketplace aimed at European defense ministries.

Before this announcement with the Dutch government, Intelic had already raised funding from institutions such as ABN AMRO, the European Investment Fund, Invest-NL, the SME pension fund, Limburg regional development company LIOF, and research institute TNO, via the European defense and security technology fund run by Keen Venture Partners, according to Paraat.

NEXUS, the software already tested on the Ukrainian battlefield

At the heart of this partnership is NEXUS, Intelic's command and control software, which allows drones from different manufacturers to operate together within a single mission environment, according to Reuters. This software has been used on the battlefield in Ukraine since last year, a detail that gives the product an operational credibility rarely granted to such a young company.

According to Intelic CEO Maurits Korthals Altes, quoted by Reuters, "Europe now has more than 700 drone manufacturers, and that number keeps growing." For defense organizations, he added, "the challenge is no longer access to technology, but making sure these technologies can work together."

A lesson imported directly from the Ukrainian front

Boswijk and the sentence that sums it all up

State Secretary for Defense Derk Boswijk explained the logic behind this investment in blunt terms, quoted by Reuters: "Ukraine is teaching us that it is not just hardware, but also software that matters greatly." He added that getting different drone systems to work together "makes fighting easier."

That statement sums up, in one sentence, the doctrinal shift currently sweeping through Western militaries: the war in Ukraine has shown that raw technological superiority is no longer enough if systems cannot talk to each other on a battlefield saturated with cheap drones and intense electronic jamming.

A lesson shared across NATO's entire eastern flank

This realization is not confined to the Netherlands: several European defense ministries are already working with Intelic on developing the BASE platform, according to Defense News, though the exact identity of these ministries remains confidential at this stage of negotiations.

According to Defense News, the BASE marketplace already brings together drone manufacturers from nine different European countries, including Portugal's Beyond Vision, the Netherlands' DeltaQuad, Avy, Acecore Technologies, and Height Technologies, Germany's Highcat, Latvia's Origin Robotics, and Slovakia's Airvolute.

The legal mechanism of the veto right explained

A share that does not require a majority stake

A "golden share" grants its holder special rights without requiring a majority stake in the company, according to Dutch outlet TW.nl. In practical terms, this means the Dutch government could obtain oversight, even veto power, over Intelic's strategic decisions without having to pay the enormous sums a majority buyout of the company would require.

According to TW.nl, the Ministry of Defense is examining, together with the Ministry of Finance, exactly how this priority share could be structured in the coming months, a process that will take time given the absence of any Dutch legal precedent in this specific area.

Blocking a foreign sale, the ultimate goal

If this structure were put in place, Defense could, for example, obtain veto power over strategic decisions or a proposed sale of the company, according to TW.nl, with a clearly stated goal: preventing companies holding crucial defense technologies from falling into foreign hands.

One legal detail is worth noting: once the agreement is signed, the company would in principle no longer be able to block a future state decision to activate this golden share, according to TW.nl, which gives the clause a far more binding reach than a simple advisory right.

A concern the company itself openly admits

Intelic's CEO acknowledges the tension

CEO Maurits Korthals Altes himself acknowledged, according to Manorama Online, that while the state's priority stake can ease access to financing and attract investors, it also carries certain risks: the veto right granted to the Ministry of Defense could deter other potential investors from joining the company's capital.

This is precisely why negotiations over this clause are proceeding, in his view, under extremely strict conditions, designed to minimize the deterrent effect of this unusual structure on the company's future funding rounds.

The headquarters, a non-negotiable guarantee

In exchange for this particular governance structure, the Ministry of Defense would obtain a guarantee that Intelic's headquarters would remain located in the Netherlands, according to TW.nl, a clause aimed directly at preventing any future relocation of technological know-how developed in part with public funds.

Boswijk had, in fact, argued publicly the previous month for the state to acquire special stakes in several defense companies, precisely to prevent foreign takeovers of firms deemed strategic to national security, according to Manorama Online.

The wider context: Europe is buying drones without knowing which ones

A strategy that reverses the usual order

According to Resilience Media, the Dutch ministry's reasoning runs as follows: buying the coordination software first means that any drone purchased later will simply need to plug into an already operational system, rather than requiring the software architecture to be rebuilt with every new hardware purchase from a different supplier.

The outlet notes that the agreement between the Ministry of Defense and Intelic works differently from classic military contracts: NEXUS is not simply a product the army bought, it is now becoming the standard that any future drone acquired by the ministry will have to conform to, a decision made before a single additional drone has even been ordered.

A striking contrast with the Anduril contract

This Dutch choice stands in sharp contrast with a previous contract awarded by the same ministry to American company Anduril Industries, whose Lattice system was positioned as the command-and-control layer for Dutch air defense, according to outlet Ohio Atomic Press. In that earlier case, proprietary American software ended up embedded in the defense infrastructure of a NATO member country with no equivalent sovereign protection mechanism.

This contrast illustrates a gradual awakening within the Dutch ministry: having previously accepted software dependency on a foreign supplier in one case, it is now choosing to secure ownership and control of a technology deemed just as critical, but developed on its own soil.

Dutch investment in drones and artificial intelligence

A budget trajectory already underway in 2025

This investment in Intelic does not come out of nowhere: as early as 2025, then-State Secretary for Defense Gijs Tuinman had announced an investment of 310 million euros, or roughly $352 million, aimed at expanding the use of drones and artificial intelligence in Dutch defense operations, according to Defense Mirror.

Tuinman had at the time mentioned partnerships with Dutch companies such as Lobster Robotics, which develops an underwater robot fitted with optical sensors for infrastructure inspection, as well as Avalor AI, since renamed Intelic, already collaborating on drone software development at that time, according to Defense Mirror.

DefGPT, the sovereign little sibling of military artificial intelligence

The Dutch Ministry of Defense has also developed "DefGPT," a secure artificial intelligence platform modeled on ChatGPT but entirely isolated from the public internet, according to Defense Mirror, a project reflecting a broader push for digital sovereignty applied to all military digital tools, not just drones.

This continuity between the 2025 announcements and the July 2026 one shows that the Intelic investment is not an isolated flourish, but the logical outcome of a technological sovereignty strategy underway for several years within the Dutch Ministry of Defense.

The BASE marketplace and Intelic's pan-European ambition

More than a thousand suppliers, one single interface

Launched on May 4, 2026, the BASE platform aims to unify Europe's fragmented drone market through a common command-and-control software layer called NEXUS, according to Dutch outlet Paraat. CEO Korthals Altes explained, in a video interview, that the company aims to become "the spider at the center of the web" of the more than a thousand drone suppliers that make up today's European market.

According to Defense News, BASE's stated goal is to speed up procurement by letting European militaries directly compare different unmanned systems available on the market, a valuable time saving in a context where the speed of military procurement has itself become a major strategic factor against Russia.

A 180 million euro funding round in the background

According to Paraat, the European defense and security technology fund run by Keen Venture Partners, which took part in financing Intelic, had raised 180 million euros by the end of April 2026, a sum illustrating the growing appetite of European private investors for dual-use civilian-and-military defense technologies.

The company has also signed an agreement with research institute TNO to further strengthen its capabilities in military drones, according to Paraat, a partnership that anchors Intelic even more deeply in the Dutch defense scientific and industrial ecosystem.

What this says about military doctrine against Russia

The drone war has changed the rules

The war in Ukraine has shown, month after month, that classic air superiority matters less and less against swarms of cheap drones capable of neutralizing equipment worth tens of millions of dollars, a lesson that Western military staffs, including the Dutch, have visibly come to integrate into their procurement doctrine.

This doctrinal shift explains why the Dutch Ministry of Defense now accepts paying first for software intelligence rather than for the drones' metal itself: in a high-intensity conflict, it is the ability to quickly connect dozens of different systems that will determine the outcome of battle, far more than the individual performance of any single aircraft.

An indirect answer to Vladimir Putin's aggression

While no official statement explicitly links this investment to a specific Russian threat, the geopolitical context remains ever-present: the Baltic states, Poland, and now the Netherlands are all ramping up defensive investment against a Vladimir Putin regime that has shown, since the start of its invasion of Ukraine, no sincere willingness toward lasting de-escalation.

In this climate, every euro invested in the resilience of Dutch drone software contributes, indirectly but concretely, to NATO's collective deterrence against a Russia that keeps testing the limits of Western solidarity on the Alliance's eastern flank.

Possible criticisms and the file's gray areas

A still-unclear amount, limited transparency

It must honestly be acknowledged that the exact size of the state's future stake in Intelic remains uncertain, ranging depending on the source between 20 and 90 million euros, a gap reflecting either an ongoing negotiation or a deliberate choice of discretion for security and commercial sensitivity reasons, according to Manorama Online.

This partial opacity, understandable as it is in a national security matter, inevitably fuels legitimate questions about exactly how public money will be used and about the precise criteria that will determine any future activation of the government's veto right.

The risk of deterring private investors

As CEO Korthals Altes himself acknowledged, there is a real risk that this particular governance structure could cool the interest of potential private investors, which could, paradoxically, slow the growth of a company the state is precisely trying to protect and help thrive over the long term.

This paradox is not unique to the Netherlands: wherever Western governments try to secure strategic technology assets, the same tension resurfaces between national protection and the vital need for private capital to fund rapid growth against better-capitalized international competitors, particularly American ones.

Comparison with other Western models of technology protection

A tool already familiar elsewhere in Europe

The golden share mechanism is not a Dutch invention: several European governments, notably in the United Kingdom and France, have already used similar devices to protect companies deemed strategic in sensitive sectors such as energy, telecommunications, or aerospace, before the Netherlands considered it for the first time in the private defense technology sector.

What sets the Dutch case apart is its application to a young software company rather than a large historical industrial infrastructure, a sign that the very definition of what constitutes "critical infrastructure" is evolving rapidly as military software gains strategic weight relative to traditional physical hardware.

The United States, a different but equally protectionist model

In the United States, protecting strategic defense technologies generally works through different mechanisms, notably foreign investment screening via the CFIUS committee, rather than direct state stakes in private companies, an approach that illustrates the diversity of legal tools Western democracies use to pursue a shared goal of technological sovereignty.

Whatever method is chosen, the underlying trend remains the same on both sides of the Atlantic: Western governments are progressively tightening control over critical defense technologies, a direct reaction to years of relative naivety in the face of Chinese and Russian industrial ambitions in sensitive technology sectors.

Next steps in the Intelic case

Months of technical negotiations ahead

According to TW.nl, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Finance still need to determine, over the coming months, exactly how this priority share will be structured legally, a process that will likely involve consultations with experts in corporate law and national security law.

This delay is not trivial: it reflects the real complexity of creating an entirely new legal precedent in the Netherlands, a country where the tradition of the state not directly intervening in private company capital remains historically fairly strong compared with other, more interventionist European economies.

A test for other Dutch defense companies

The Intelic case will be closely watched by the entire Dutch defense ecosystem, since its outcome will determine whether the government extends this type of protection mechanism to other technology companies deemed strategic, consistent with Boswijk's remarks the previous month about the need to simultaneously secure several national defense assets.

If the Intelic experiment proves successful, both in terms of technological protection and the company's financial health, it could well become a model replicated elsewhere in Europe, in a context where the race for military technological sovereignty is only just beginning against determined strategic rivals.

Why this case reaches well beyond Dutch borders

A precedent the whole of Europe will be watching

What is unfolding in Amsterdam actually concerns the entire European continent: if the Netherlands manages to show that it is possible to protect a strategic technology company without stifling its capacity for innovation or its ability to raise private capital, this model could quickly spread to other European capitals facing the same dilemmas.

Conversely, if negotiations fail or the chosen structure proves too rigid, that failure will also serve as a potentially costly lesson for governments considering a similar approach elsewhere on the continent in the years ahead.

Software, the new frontier of military sovereignty

More broadly, this case illustrates a fundamental shift in how the West now thinks about its security: software, long seen as a mere support tool for military hardware, is gradually becoming a strategic asset in its own right, deserving legal and financial protection equivalent to that traditionally granted to arms factories or shipyards.

This cultural shift, triggered by the war in Ukraine and accelerated by initiatives like the Netherlands', could well redefine in the years ahead how every NATO country structures its relationship with its own national technology champions.

The potential impact on Europe's drone industry

Positive pressure toward sector consolidation

If the Dutch model works, it could encourage other European drone manufacturers to join the BASE platform and adopt the NEXUS standard as a common interoperability layer, rather than each developing their own closed, mutually incompatible protocols, a fragmentation that has long weakened the competitiveness of Europe's defense industry against American and Israeli giants in the sector.

Such standardization, if it materializes at continental scale, would considerably reduce integration costs for European defense ministries and speed up deployment timelines for new unmanned systems in the field, a meaningful operational edge against adversaries who do not have to manage the same diversity of suppliers.

A risk of dependency on a single supplier

This standardization nonetheless carries its own risk: by building its entire software architecture around a single company, even a Dutch one protected by a golden share, the Ministry of Defense creates a new form of technological dependency, this time on a domestic rather than a foreign supplier.

This risk is nonetheless judged acceptable by Dutch authorities, insofar as the proposed golden share offers precisely a mechanism of direct control over this dependency, unlike an equivalent dependency on a foreign company over which the Dutch government would have no comparable governance leverage.

Conclusion: a quiet but potentially decisive precedent

A decision that will weigh more than its price tag

The investment of more than 30 million euros in Intelic, modest as it may seem compared with NATO's overall military budgets, could prove far more decisive than its size suggests, precisely because it touches the very core of how Western militaries will fight tomorrow: through software integration rather than the mere accumulation of hardware.

The possible "golden share" being considered by the Dutch ministry stands, in that sense, as a real-world test for all of Europe: whether Western democracies can finally protect their own defense technology innovations without smothering them under excessive bureaucracy or counterproductive distrust of the private sector.

A constant reminder from the Ukrainian front

Behind every line of this Dutch case lies the same source of inspiration: Ukrainian resistance, which continues to teach the entire West operational lessons paid for at great cost on the ground, lessons that countries like the Netherlands now bear the moral and strategic responsibility to turn into a lasting collective advantage for the entire Atlantic Alliance.

The Intelic case is therefore not just another financial deal among many: it is a revealing marker of how the West, driven by necessity, is finally relearning to think about its security systemically, weaving software, hardware, and industrial sovereignty into a single strategic equation.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my limits

I am a columnist, not a specialist in Dutch corporate law or an expert in military cybersecurity. My editorial angle is declared: I believe the West must strengthen its technological sovereignty against Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, and I unreservedly support NATO and its members' efforts to protect their strategic defense industries.

I cannot guarantee the final outcome of negotiations between the Dutch Ministry of Defense and Intelic regarding the exact structure of the golden share, nor predict whether it will actually materialize on the terms currently being discussed. I limit myself to the public information available at the time of writing this narrative.

A caveat on the available figures

The amounts cited in this narrative, notably the range of 20 to 90 million euros for the state's potential stake, come from separate media sources and have not been confirmed in a single, detailed financial statement by the Dutch Ministry of Defense at the time this article was published.

Sources

Primary sources

Reuters — Dutch military invests millions in drone software platform, July 3, 2026

Intelic — Official release on the partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Defense, July 2, 2026

Manorama Online — Netherlands Defense Ministry invests heavily in drone software company, July 4, 2026

Secondary sources

TW.nl — Defense invests millions in a Dutch drone company and wants special control, July 3, 2026

Resilience Media — Software before drones: Dutch Defence Ministry bets on interoperability, July 3, 2026

Defense News — Dutch startup Intelic sets up drone marketplace for European militaries, May 4, 2026

Defense Mirror — Netherlands to spend $352 million on drones and AI in 2025, March 31, 2025

Ohio Atomic Press — Anduril quietly plants its flag in Europe as Netherlands hands Silicon Valley weapons startup a no-bid drone defense contract, May 9, 2026