Remember all those videos of Ukrainian sea drones taking out Russia’s Black Sea Fleet?
Well, UFORCE, the company making those USVs and a whole range of unmanned systems, officially emerged from stealth today with a $1B+ valuation after raising over $50M from a transatlantic team led by Shield Capital and Lakestar.
Good news for all those countries—the US included—that are increasingly eager to get their hands on some battle-proven Ukrainian tech.
U-Force multiplier: UFORCE’s tech isn’t exactly new, per se.
The company, now headquartered in London, is more of a conglomerate of nine Ukrainian defense companies that merged early last year to integrate all their capabilities. Those companies have been making some of the most widely used unmanned systems in Ukraine, including:
- MAGURA: A series of unmanned surface vessels responsible for sinking a dozen Russian naval warships and the first USV to shoot down manned helicopters and fighters.
- Nemesis: A family of medium and heavy strike multirotor bomber UAVs that are among the most popular and effective in Ukraine, earning them the mythological nickname “Baba Yaga” from Russian forces.
- Lyut 2 (Fury): An unmanned ground vehicle with an integrated turret built to engage stationary and moving targets.
- Sunray: A next-gen counter-UAS laser system, recently profiled in The Atlantic.
Gun glue: UFORCE, as the new parent company, serves as the systems integrator for almost a dozen varying technologies, and they’re betting that teaming up will turn it into “Anduril, but made in Ukraine and battle-proven,” said CEO Oleg Rogynskyy, who previously founded the first Ukrainian-origin Silicon Valley unicorn, People.ai. “Western capital will glue it all together,” he told Tectonic in an interview.
“We fused the teams together because they’ve had to interoperate and have been working together for a long time,” Rogynskyy said. “That allowed us to create a company like this at speed and velocity that a typical merger would not have made available.”
Speedy scale: Since forming the umbrella company last January, UFORCE has proven pretty dang popular, booking nine-figure orders and growing almost 500 percent in 2025 alone. The company now operates in 15 locations across six allied countries, including Ukraine and the UK.
That growth—and the high demand for UFORCE’s tech in Ukraine and beyond—caught the attention of investors on both sides of the pond, especially European VC giant Lakestar and US defense tech VC Shield Capital. Rogynskyy couldn’t confirm exact figures, but the raise, which took place six months ago (very sneaky), was over $50M, driving the company’s valuation over the $1B mark.
“The idea behind this whole thing is to unlock a lot of private Western capital to, priority one, support Ukraine and grow the Ukrainian defense tech industry, and priority two, obviously, provide a return on investment” by scaling outside of Ukraine, he added. “Our number one priority is to provide Ukraine with everything it needs, and if there are leftovers that Ukraine is not consuming, those can be provided as turnkey solutions outside.”
Money talks: That attention hasn’t waned since the initial fundraise last year: UFORCE is “getting a lot of interest” from both sides of the Atlantic, but “one side of the pond has a lot more money than the other, and there’s a third side of the pond that has even more money and really needs things right now,” Rogynskyy said, referring to US allies in the Gulf currently running to Ukraine for help taking down Iranian Shaheds.
Despite all the inter-NATO feuding as of late, UFORCE is betting that having a transatlantic team on the cap table will be pretty central to future growth.
“My position is that both sides of the pond are going to have to work together for a while, because the enemy set that we’re competing with is still the same—Russia, China, and Iran,” Rogynskyy said. “It’s important for us to not just be European and not just be American: We are a global company that helps the West stand up to its opponents.”