The Dutch Ministry of Defense will invest more than €30 million in Intelic, the Amsterdam company whose NEXUS command-and-control software lets drones from competing manufacturers fly inside a single operational picture. The three-year strategic partnership, announced Friday, makes the Netherlands what Intelic says is the first country in the world to formally fund a Software-First approach to military drone procurement: pay for the connective layer first, pick the airframes later.

DroneXL has been tracking this company since spring. When I covered Intelic’s launch of the BASE drone marketplace on May 6, the firm was still finalizing its first agreement with the Royal Netherlands Army. Eight weeks later, that pilot has grown into a formal state partnership covering the software backbone of the entire future Dutch military drone fleet.

One detail from the Dutch press did not make the international wire coverage: the ministry is exploring an option to take a golden share in Intelic. It would be the first such holding Dutch Defense has ever owned in a company.

NEXUS Puts Rival Manufacturers’ Drones Under One Command Screen

NEXUS is Intelic’s command-and-control platform that connects unmanned aerial and ground systems from different manufacturers inside one mission environment, and under the new partnership it becomes the software foundation the Dutch military will build its entire unmanned strategy around over the next three years.

According to Intelic’s announcement, the company will work directly with the ministry to develop and evolve the architecture that ties flying and driving robots into one operational environment, cutting deployment times and reducing operator training. Reuters’ Bart Meijer reported the deal on Friday, July 3.

Intelic CEO Maurits Korthals Altes says Europe now counts more than 700 drone manufacturers, a number that keeps growing. For defense buyers, he argues, “the challenge is no longer access to technology, but ensuring those technologies can operate together.” In his telling, military advantage now flows from software that connects platforms rather than contracts that lock governments into individual systems.

A housekeeping note, because some early aggregated coverage labeled Intelic a Ukrainian developer: the company is Dutch. It was founded in Amsterdam in 2021 as Avalor AI and pivoted to defense, a history we detailed in our May reporting.

Ukraine’s Battlefield Wrote The Requirements For This Deal

The Dutch ministry says the case for interoperability was proven on the Ukrainian frontline, where NEXUS has been in combat use since 2025 and where operators juggling drone types from dozens of makers had to solve integration under fire rather than inside a procurement office.

State Secretary of Defense Derk Boswijk drew the lesson directly from that war: “not only the hardware, but also the software is of great importance.” Making different drone systems work together, he added, eases the fight. Per earlier Defense News reporting, NEXUS already runs on Gurzuf Defence‘s Heavy Shot strike drones in Ukraine, and Intelic has been working to integrate its software with Skyeton‘s Raybird reconnaissance platform.

The deal also lands inside a much larger Dutch pivot toward unmanned systems. The ministry wants more than half of its operational effects to come from drones within five years, as The Next Web noted, and the Netherlands signed a €200 million joint production deal with Ukraine in October 2025, with drones rolling out of the VDL factory in Borne.

A Golden Share Would Turn Intelic Into State Infrastructure

Boswijk told Het Parool that Defense is exploring, together with the Finance Ministry, an option to acquire a golden share in Intelic, a special stake carrying veto rights over certain company decisions, and it would be the first golden share the Dutch Defense Ministry has ever held.

Boswijk called Intelic enormously important to his ministry, according to NL Times, which picked up the Parool interview. “We are already going beyond a normal customer-supplier relationship,” the state secretary said. Intelic staff will join Dutch military exercises to refine the software in the field alongside soldiers, and the construction is designed to shield the company from foreign takeover and keep it anchored in the Netherlands. Boswijk floated golden shares last month as a way for the state to get more grip on its domestic defense industry. Intelic would be the test case.

The Pentagon Keeps Failing The Test The Dutch Just Passed

The United States has spent years and a billion dollars trying to make drones from different vendors operate together, and interoperability failures did as much as anything to stall the Pentagon’s Replicator effort before an efficiency unit seized control of the program last fall.

We reported in October how the Pentagon’s DOGE unit took over the military drone program after Replicator’s integration breakdowns, and how Norway fielded NATO’s first operational drone swarm by iterating software directly with soldiers instead of waiting on acquisition paperwork. Europe’s other software-layer champion, Auterion, raised $130 million in September on a comparable pitch: one software stack, any manufacturer’s aircraft.

The through line is hard to miss. The difficult problem in Western drone power is no longer building aircraft. It is making them work together. The Netherlands just became the first government to fund that problem as the starting point of procurement instead of the cleanup phase.

DroneXL’s Take

When I wrote about Intelic’s BASE launch in May, I argued the real story was the company’s claim that Europe’s drone hardware is already good enough, and that the missing piece was the connective tissue to deploy it across borders. Eight weeks later, a NATO defense ministry put more than €30 million behind that exact argument. That is fast, even by wartime standards.

Here is the contrast worth sitting with. Washington’s answer to drone insecurity has been to legislate hardware by country of origin: ban DJI and hope the software sorts itself out. The Hague’s answer is to own the command layer, so the question of who built the airframe stops being existential. A sovereign, platform-agnostic control stack that can fly a Latvian interceptor, a Slovak quad, and a Ukrainian strike drone from the same screen turns hardware into something you swap the moment a better or cheaper option appears. That is security. A hardware ban is a moat around your weakest supplier.

The honest objection is that the Netherlands just traded hardware lock-in for software lock-in with a single vendor. The golden share is the answer to that objection. When the state holds veto rights over its command-and-control supplier, the lock-in runs both ways.

Two things are worth watching, and both are real processes already underway. First, the golden share. Defense and the Finance Ministry are actively exploring it, and if it converts, the Dutch state’s first golden share in a defense company would confirm that Europe now treats drone software the way it treats ports and power grids. Second, Intelic told Defense News in May that it was in talks with several other European defense ministries it declined to name. Whether a second country signs a Software-First deal decides if the Netherlands just started a procurement model or bought a one-off.

Sources: Intelic, Reuters, NL Times / Het Parool, Defense News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.