Hadrien Canter is Co-Founder and CEO of Alta Ares, a French AI-first defense company building an integrated platform for drone detection, identification, tracking, and interception, with systems actively deployed in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Hadrien studied International Law at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, qualified with the Paris Bar, and served as an OSCE international observer near Mariupol in 2019, giving him firsthand exposure to the realities of Eastern European conflict.

His path into defense technology is unconventional: trained as a lawyer, Hadrien identified the cognitive fatigue of Ukrainian soldiers battling Shahed drone swarms and recognized that AI-driven automation was the only scalable answer.

Prior to founding Alta Ares, Hadrien held roles at EY in M&A, as a Litigation Specialist at Koerner Law Firm, and in Offshore Oil and Gas compliance at Schlumberger across Europe and Africa, building a cross-sector foundation in strategy, law, and international operations.

Alta Ares won the NATO Allied Command Transformation Innovation Challenge in March 2025, has raised over 2M euros in Seed funding, and its Pixel-Lock AI interceptor system has doubled drone interception success rates from roughly 30% to over 60% in live combat conditions.