Part of the record $700 million investment raised by the defense technology company UFORCE, under the terms of the agreement with the sovereign investor, may be used exclusively in Ukraine. At the same time, the company's main product is not individual drones, but a unified software ecosystem with artificial intelligence that unites maritime, aerial, and ground systems into multi-domain swarms.
This was stated by UFORCE CEO Oleh Rohynskyi in an interview with Forbes Ukraine.
According to the company's head, the Series A investment round has a clear allocation: funds from one of the sovereign funds will be directed purely toward the Ukrainian direction, while the other portion of the capital will be used to scale supply chains and production abroad. For R&D, the company continues to hire specialists in Ukraine as much as possible, engaging foreign specialists (in particular, natives of SpaceX, Tesla, and OpenAI) only due to the shortage of personnel on the local market.
Oleh Rohynskyi notes that despite media attention to hardware developments such as Magura naval drones or Nemesis unmanned aerial vehicles, the main value of UFORCE is precisely the software.
“I don’t understand why software isn’t sexy in defense. It’s the most interesting part: one software stack controls systems at sea, in the air, and on land. It works both through the cloud and autonomously on devices when there is no connectivity. All of this is integrated with artificial intelligence. Software is ten times more important than one might think from the news. Investors are interested in precisely that,” explained the CEO of UFORCE.
The main goal of AI integration is to allow a single operator to effectively control a thousand drones simultaneously. It was precisely the depth of software development, swarm coordination, and multi-domain integration that became the decisive factors for investors, in particular the Valor fund, during the company's valuation.
"We already have swarms of multi-domain drones, where Nemesis-type drones take off from the Magura and everything works together with the help of AI. Swarms of five drones are not news to us. Work on swarms is ongoing, the infrastructure exists, and clients are buying more," Rohynskyi added, noting that there is high demand for this infrastructure abroad.
It was previously reported that the Ukrainian defense startup UFORCE closed a Series A investment round in the amount of $700 million at a business valuation of $6 billion. The company plans to invest the raised capital in scaling unmanned systems, expanding production capacity in Ukraine and partner countries, as well as in the development of laser interception systems and turrets to combat Shahed-type attack drones.