Steven Krekels

Steven Krekels speaks from direct operational experience, and the throughline in everything he says is that the drone threat is already here, hugely underestimated, and moving faster than institutions can regulate it. His central statistic sets the tone: only 10-15% of drone flights his sensors detect worldwide broadcast the legally required remote ID, and around Belgian airports 90-95% of flights are simply unauthorized ¹². He is careful, though, not to turn this into alarmism about malicious actors alone. His taxonomy of "de Clueless, de Careless en de Criminals" ¹² is the clearest distillation of his worldview: most illegal flights come from people who don't know the rules (often new drone owners after Christmas) or know them but ignore them, and only a minority are genuinely criminal. This framing lets him hold two things at once, that the sky above us is essentially unpoliced, and that the fix is mostly about awareness and infrastructure rather than fear.

That said, he does not downplay the criminal and geopolitical end of the spectrum. He describes drones landing on rooftops with routers to execute man-in-the-middle attacks, sitting for days on solar panels to eavesdrop, and jamming a logistics center's scanners before a ransom demand: "Vervelend hè? Zoveel bitcoins op die rekening en we zullen hem afzetten" ¹². He extends this into a broader hybrid-warfare argument, floating the idea that "een aantal landen en niet alleen Rusland ons gebruikt om hier en daar wat dingen aan te testen" ², and drawing a pointed line from everyday consumer technology to state surveillance: "Al de BYD die rondrijden, dat zijn ogen en oren van China in ons socio-economisch weefsel" ¹². At the same time he is a debunker of hype where the evidence doesn't hold up, explicitly doubting that the Copenhagen airport closure was actually drone-related and comparing the media-driven spike in "sightings" to a UFO wave ¹². This combination, taking the threat seriously while refusing to inflate unconfirmed incidents, is one of his most consistent traits across both conversations.

Krekels is also emphatic about the physical security blind spot his industry addresses. Companies pour resources into badges, facial recognition and guards, he says, while ignoring the airspace above their own buildings: "vergeet uw derde dimensie niet, want je kan bij bedrijven binnengaan en passen en gezichtserkenning en fysische bewaking en al wat dat je wilt" ¹². This is not abstract for him, it's the gap Senhive's technology is built to close, including detecting a pilot's position rather than just the drone itself, since legally only defense and police may neutralize a drone while private security, such as at the Port of Antwerp, cannot act on the aircraft directly ¹².

The Paris Olympics engagement stands out as his proof point for how fast the company had to move under real pressure. The French gendarmerie approached Senhive only 2.5 months before the opening ceremony because the domestic solution wasn't working, "Die hebben letterlijk 2,5 maand voor de opening van de Olympische Spelen gezegd: we hebben jullie nodig" ¹, and in that window Senhive built a mobile version of its system and deployed 20 units, intercepting roughly 800 illegal drones. He treats this less as a triumphant anecdote than as evidence of a shift in market perception: "Drie, vier jaar geleden hadden we het gevoel dat we wat in de woestijn aan het roepen waren en nu is dat gevoel volledig verdwenen" ¹². It also reflects a broader pattern in how he describes Senhive's growth: the company originally built wildfire detection technology and pivoted toward drone detection simply because that's where customer attention went, and it now scales globally not through direct sales but through a network of local resellers and integrators, which is how it ended up protecting Central Park in New York and pursuing opportunities in Japan ¹.

On the battlefield, Krekels is precise about both the current limits and the trajectory of the technology. He notes that drones in Ukraine remain human-controlled carriers of cameras or explosives, not autonomous weapons, yet the front line there is roughly 20-30 km wide simply because that is the operational range of drones ¹². He uses Operation Spiderweb as his touchstone example of innovation speed: an Estonian startup built a drone expected to last six months operationally, and Russia neutralized it in three, forcing an entirely new version ¹². Those drones also used AI-based landmark positioning, comparing live camera images against stored maps to navigate GPS-denied environments, which he treats as a preview of where the technology is heading ¹. His summary of the underlying economics is blunt and memorable: "Een drone van een paar honderd vernietigt een vliegtuig van een paar miljoen" ¹.

Looking forward, Krekels resists the more utopian visions of drone logistics. He doesn't see door-to-door delivery by 2030 as realistic, since a van serving an entire street remains more efficient, but he does see dedicated corridors emerging, such as above the Albert Canal for urgent packages, or air taxis operating over water ¹. This measured, infrastructure-first thinking mirrors his broader philosophy about pace and adaptation: "Het tempo van innovatie in dat wereldje is zo hoog dat je moet er continu mee bezig zijn om dat te kunnen volgen" ¹, paired with his recognition that innovation is never a clean win, "Dat lost een probleem op en dat creëert weer een nieuw probleem" ¹.

Finally, Krekels connects all of this to a concern about how people learn and think in an AI-saturated world. He observes that access to raw knowledge has exploded while genuine understanding has fallen behind it, "Kennis is heel toegankelijk, maar het begrip en het begrijpen van die kennis, dat is gedisconnecteerd geraakt met die kennis" ², and argues that education's priority now has to be teaching critical thinking rather than information itself ¹. Taken together, his recurring message is that speed, adaptability and unglamorous awareness, knowing the rules, watching the third dimension, following the pace of innovation, matter more than any single dramatic threat, and that institutions, companies and individuals are all still catching up to a sky that is already far busier and more contested than most people assume.