European aerospace and defence company Destinus has been selected as one of five finalists to advance to Stage 2 of the European Defence Agency’s (EDA) Sentinel Strike Challenge, following a highly competitive first phase that attracted more than 140 expressions of interest from companies across participating EU Member States.

The Sentinel Strike Challenge, organised through the European Defence Agency’s Hub for European Defence Innovation (HEDI), is designed to evaluate next-generation European loitering munition technologies under realistic operational conditions. Destinus ranked among the five highest-scoring applicants and has been invited to participate in the second stage of the competition.

Stage 2 will be conducted from 28 September to 9 October 2026 at the Santa Margarida Military Training Area in Portugal. Hosted by the Portuguese Army as part of the EDA Operational Experimentation Campaign 2026, and held in conjunction with the ARTEX26 exercise, the event will provide an operational environment in which participating companies will demonstrate their systems under demanding battlefield conditions.

During the experimentation campaign, Destinus will demonstrate its European-developed loitering munition system, which has already gained operational experience in demanding environments. Military users from EU Member States will evaluate the competing systems across the complete precision-strike mission cycle, including mission planning, launch, target detection, engagement and post-strike assessment. The assessments will be carried out under realistic, degraded and contested operational conditions.

The five finalists will compete for a Stage 2 prize pool of €1.8 million.

According to the European Defence Agency, the Sentinel Strike Challenge is not a procurement competition, but an operational experimentation initiative intended to generate objective and comparable performance data for European defence ministries. The programme is designed to support future capability development by providing military users with first-hand operational evidence of emerging European technologies.

For Destinus, participation represents an important opportunity to demonstrate its capabilities alongside other leading European developers, with its system assessed by European military users under common testing standards and realistic operational scenarios.

The results of Stage 2 are expected to be announced during the European Defence Agency Annual Conference in early 2027.