Acecore Brand Guidelines: The Uden Maker of Hand-Built Carbon-Fibre Drones

A pilot, a product designer and a first drone called NEO.

Acecore Technologies is a Dutch maker of professional multirotor drones based in Uden, in the province of North Brabant. The company dates its founding to 2013, and a July 2021 press release published by sUAS News repeats that date and names Jorrit Linders as its founder and CEO. The Dutch army’s magazine Landmacht, profiling the firm in its second issue of 2026, also calls Linders the founder and director; in that interview he says Acecore has been making multirotor drones for the creative and industrial markets since 2016; the company itself gives 2013 as its founding year.

The company’s own account of its beginnings is a design story. It says that around 2010 Linders was flying multirotors carrying cinema cameras in harsh conditions and was frustrated by how the equipment of the time performed and lasted. He hired, the company says, an industrial product designer who had been working on flying cars as Acecore’s first employee, and together they produced the first Acecore drone, the NEO. Acecore says it was founded “to raise the bar in terms of performance and looks” and that it values beauty alongside function.

The NEO brought the company into the international drone press in 2017. On 17 July 2017 DroneLife reported that the seventh season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which had premiered the night before, included footage filmed with the NEO, shot the previous winter at locations across Iceland. Linders, described by the magazine as Acecore’s CEO and pilot, told it the cold and strong winds made the work very challenging, and the article said the production had used drones rather than helicopters for its Iceland aerial work for the first time. Linders still cites the Iceland shoot when describing the company’s origins in film, photography and live broadcasting.

Zoe, Noa and a camera moved to the front.

Acecore’s current range is built around a small number of named platforms rather than a long catalogue. The company describes Zoe as a compact quadcopter for mapping, surveying and inspection, with interchangeable batteries, landing gear and booms; Noa as a heavy-lift hexacopter for large LiDAR sensors, multi-sensor set-ups and cinema rigs; and Noa Hybrid as a version with a gas-electric powertrain meant for long corridors such as pipelines and power lines. It says every platform shares a carbon-fibre construction and a modular payload bay, and that it integrates sensors in-house, naming RIEGL and YellowScan LiDAR, Sony and Phase One cameras and Workswell thermal payloads among them.

The Zoe Zetona, launched in July 2021, shows the design thinking the company likes to talk about. According to the launch release carried by sUAS News, it is a variation of the Zoe built for asset inspection and land surveying, with a Sony camera held on a custom two-axis Gremsy gimbal mounted at the front of the body rather than slung underneath, so the camera can tilt from straight up to straight down without the frame in view. The release said the Zetona also introduced an Acecore coaxial motor that fits inside the original housing. Linders said in it that moving the payload forward meant rearranging many of the drone’s components to keep it balanced.

Acecore has also used its aircraft for public trials. In June 2020 DroneLife reported that the company had flown at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, working with the Dutch Drone Delta programme under a temporary exemption, to test runway inspection and the delivery of aircraft parts across the airport. A NEO octocopter carried a magnetic cargo module for the parts runs. Linders told the magazine that he considered the airport, with its control tower overseeing every movement, a good environment for testing.

Commercial and delivery drones.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Hand-built in North Brabant, flown by the armed forces.

Making things by hand is the centre of how Acecore presents itself. The company says all of its drones are hand-crafted at its headquarters in the Netherlands from premium, locally sourced materials, and the 2021 release described the fleet as European-made and full carbon fibre. Its slogan, used as a hashtag across its website, is #elevatingdrones, which it says it uses as a trademark; it describes its aim as replacing “uninspiring, compromised tube frames” with handcrafted aircraft. It also says it supports each system for at least four years with backwards-compatible upgrades.

Defence is now a documented part of the business. In the 2026 Landmacht interview, Linders said Acecore supplies the Royal Netherlands Army and the navy with both large hexacopters and smaller quadcopters, and that army engineer units use them with camera and LiDAR systems to map their surroundings. He described the work as custom development, adapting handles, connectors, radio frequencies, positioning systems and sensor mounts to how the troops use the aircraft. On its own website the company lists dedicated military configurations, the M4 based on the Zoe and the M6 based on the Noa Hybrid, paired with its Signav Pro controller, and says their availability is subject to export controls.

Visually, Acecore’s identity follows the aircraft: dark carbon-fibre airframes, product names kept short — NEO, Zoe, Noa — and a website that leads with the phrase “Designed to perform”. Its claim to value good looks as much as function runs through its own story of a product designer as employee number one.

For a design guide, Acecore shows how a small workshop can make craft and appearance part of a professional tool. Compare Flyability, another maker of inspection drones, and Wingtra, a European maker of mapping drones. For this guide we use a carbon black, a cool grey and an amber accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Acecore’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.