Keen portfolio company Intelic signs strategic partnership with the Dutch Ministry of Defence worth over €30 million

Under the agreement, Intelic will build the software architecture that allows the Ministry's unmanned aerial and ground systems to operate as one connected ecosystem, centred on Intelic's command-and-control platform, NEXUS. The deal reflects the Ministry's shift establishing interoperability towards a software-first approach to defence procurement.

"Ukraine teaches us that not only the hardware, but also the software is of great importance. Making different drone systems work together makes the fight easier. I am proud that a Dutch company can now meet this demand. We are entering into a partnership together, leaving the classic customer-supplier relationship behind us and committing to each other for a longer period of time."

– Derk Boswijk, Minister for Arms Procurement and Personnel of the Netherlands (Staatssecretaris van Defensie)

"Europe now has more than 700 drone manufacturers, and that number continues to grow. For defence organisations, the challenge is no longer access to technology, but ensuring those technologies can operate together. Military advantage increasingly depends on software that connects platforms rather than locking governments into individual systems. This partnership reflects a fundamental shift from platform-centric procurement to software-defined defence capabilities built around interoperability."

- Maurits Korthals Altes, CEO of Intelic

"This is exactly the kind of milestone we back Intelic to reach -a European software company earning a long-term, trust-based partnership with a Ministry of Defence rather than a one-off contract. It's also the clearest signal yet that Intelic is ready to take this model beyond theNetherlands"

-  Join statement from Ties Klinkhamer, Associate, and Alexander Ribbink, General Partner at Keen Venture Partners

This deal is also a statement of intent: Intelic, and by extension the Dutch defence tech ecosystem, is open for business with NATO countries. A Ministry of Defence contract of this scale and duration signals that Intelic is a credible, trusted partner for NATO governments and allied defence organisations, not just in the Netherlands, but wherever interoperable, software-first defence capability is needed. Keen sees this as the first step in Intelic's international expansion, and as further validation of the case for investing in NATO-aligned European resilience solutions.

In June 2026, Keen published Surviving Dutch Defence Procurement: A Practical (and Surely Incomplete) Guide for European Defence Tech Founders, mapping the innovation-first pathway into Dutch defence procurement and the structural traps that derail founders before they reach a contract. Intelic's agreement with the Ministry is precisely the kind of outcome the paper argued should become the rule rather than the exception: a startup navigating that system successfully, with the right specialist capital behind it. The full white paper is available here.