The counter-drone club just got its newest—and maybe youngest—member.
In an exclusive release to Tectonic, Thermopylae, a California-based interceptor drone startup launched in June by a 21-year-old Ukrainian engineer, announced it has raised $1.6M in pre-seed funding.
New kids: Drawing its name from the famous Spartan battle against the Persians immortalized in the movie “300,” Thermopylae’s mission is similarly rooted in defense against a far larger invading force. The startup was founded by Yehor Balytskyi, a self-taught engineer who left Ukraine at 17 after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
After a stint at Entrepreneurs First, a top tech accelerator based in London, and at several European companies working in distributed systems, cryptography, and cybersecurity, he got a refugee visa to move to the US earlier this year. He may not have been old enough to drink, but nothing says you can’t make interceptor drones before your 21st birthday.
Balytskyi met his co-founder, Carter Scherer, in June and launched Thermopylae after a few successful national security hackathons. The team scored their first check from SF-based accelerator Founders, Inc. that month, demoing a working prototype to a handful of investors and soldiers in Nevada shortly after.
Speedy quick: The interceptor space is busy, but Thermopylae has a different take:
- The company builds a super lightweight foldable quadcopter launched from a standard mortar-like tube. The whole thing is designed to pack enough punch to take down glide bombs and Group 2 drones (like the Shahed).
- Using thermal guidance, the electric motor-powered interceptor can reach up to 350km/h with a payload and a targeted flight time of up to 20 minutes.
- They’re integrating the interceptor’s software with widely used Ukrainian command-and-control (C2) systems.
- The expected unit price is under $10,000, but the interceptor is designed to be partially reusable. If it doesn’t hit its target and crashes, it can be recovered and easily rebuilt into another. Handy.
“From a US market perspective, most companies working on c-UAS systems are entirely centralized, like lasers, machine guns, EW, etc.,” Balytskyi told Tectonic. “In our case, it’s very standardized for what the US and Ukrainian armies already use for something like the Javelin. Instead of launching a rocket-based projectile, you’re launching a foldable quadcopter drone that is the kinetic interceptor itself against other targets.”
Planting seeds: That neat configuration caught the attention of some early investors. After building out the prototype with their first check from Founders, Inc., Thermopylae secured $1.6M in pre-seed funding from prolific Silicon Valley investor Naval Ravikant and Ukraine-focused defense tech VC UA1, with participation from Norgard Capital and angel investors from SGA Capital, Cyrus Ventures, and others.
“Thermopylae combines two qualities that are extremely important to UA1 at this stage—deep technical expertise and rapid speed of execution,” UA1 principal Ivan Taranenko told Tectonic. “The founders bring a strong aerospace and mechanical engineering background, and they’ve shown they can turn ideas into a functional MVP in a matter of weeks.”
UA1 and Thermopylae’s shared roots were a plus, too. “We met through our shared Ukrainian defense network, and the alignment was almost immediate,” Taranenko added. “Yehor and I are both Ukrainians, and we’re both focused on solving one of the most significant problems of modern warfare: stopping low-cost, high-volume deep-strike threats.”
With $1.6M in hand, Thermopylae is planning to make the move back to Ukraine to start testing their interceptor with frontline units and build out manufacturing capacity.
“There are so many solutions out there against drones that never deploy in an actual battlefield,” Balytskyi said. “We want to make sure that from the actual start, from a pre-seed funding round, we’ll deploy it in Ukraine, and we’ll show the world, whether we fail or not, we will still take this risk and go and test it with the soldiers. I’m Ukrainian myself, so I don’t want to waste their time, but I want to provide them with this value.”