Sky Spy Raises $1.6M to Scale Battle-Tested Portable SIGINT Payload

KYIV, Ukraine — 5 December 2025

Sky Spy, a dual-use signal intelligence startup founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Arsenii Hurtavtsov and built by a Ukraineian-origin team, has raised $1.6 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round to scale production of its portable SIGINT payload Agent 001 after frontline validation in Ukraine. The funding will also support go-to-market efforts, team expansion, and the development of fully autonomous, AI-driven versions of the system.

The round was co-led by Expeditions Fund and Superangel, with participation from Freedom Fund, Sunfish Partners, Crosscourt Ventures, and Material Ventures. Sky Spy described the deal as oversubscribed, underscoring growing investor demand for defense-tech rooted in real combat experience rather than controlled testing environments.

Sky Spy develops compact signal intelligence systems designed for congested electromagnetic environments, where thousands of civilian, commercial, and military transmitters operate simultaneously. The company says lessons from the war in Ukraine show that traditional SIGINT platforms, built for relatively clean spectrum and large sensor arrays, often fail to deliver timely, reliable data in modern conflict zones. In these conditions, units have been forced to rely on visual intelligence and can miss a majority of small, high-priority targets.

“Sky Spy was built by people who’ve seen how unreliable intelligence costs lives,” said founder and CEO Arsenii Hurtavtsov. “Our mission is simple: to give forces real-time awareness in the spectrum – because the side that dominates the spectrum dominates the war.”

Hurtavtsov added that the company spent the past year and a half building with frontline operators to ensure its systems withstand real jamming, clutter, and the operational constraints soldiers face. He described the challenge as akin to “finding a needle in a haystack” in electromagnetic chaos.

Agent 001, the company’s flagship payload, is a lightweight module that mounts on small drones and turns them into autonomous spectrum hunters. Weighing just over 500 grams, the system detects, classifies, and localizes radio emitters in real time, pairing RF intelligence with visual confirmation from the drone’s camera. All signal processing happens onboard the payload, reducing latency and limiting reliance on vulnerable data links.

According to Sky Spy, Agent 001 was recently validated in combat by active military units in Ukraine, where it detected and geolocated hostile emitters including drone control stations, jammers, and other electronic warfare systems. Soldiers involved in the trials described it as the first system of its kind to demonstrate reliable performance in live combat in one of the world’s most heavily contested electromagnetic environments.

Unlike legacy SIGINT systems designed for large aircraft or fixed installations, Agent 001 is intended to be inexpensive and compact enough to deploy across small Group 1 and Group 2 drones. The payload is UAV-agnostic and can integrate with multiple antenna configurations, standard interfaces such as Ethernet and MAVLink, and existing command-and-control systems.

In a typical mission, an operator identifies a general area of interest, then sends a drone equipped with Agent 001 into the zone. The payload’s RF sensors detect emitters one by one and run them through proprietary filtering algorithms and direction-finding tools trained on wartime data. The drone then confirms the emitter’s location visually before feeding the fused target back into a fire mission or common operational picture.

Sky Spy says its hardware and algorithms maintain precision even under heavy jamming or GPS-denied conditions. By moving computation entirely onto the payload, the company aims to enable fully autonomous missions where drones can hunt, verify, and hand off targets with minimal human intervention.

Sky Spy now operates across the United States and several European countries, with a team that combines technical expertise and combat zone experience. Investors say the combination of battlefield validation, technical depth, and responsiveness to end-user feedback was central to their decision to back the company.

“We were looking for a while to find a product that could radically improve signal intelligence in contested environments,” said Andrzej Rościszewski, investment associate at Expeditions Fund. “Sky Spy’s initial product, trained on battlefield electromagnetic data, offers an attritable, airborne radio-reconnaissance platform, which aims to solve one of the most pressing problems in today’s battlefield.”

“From the first meeting, Sky Spy impressed us with their deep technical talent and real operational insight,” added Jaan Kokk, senior associate at Superangel. “We believe they have the rare ability to move fast, solve hard problems, and deliver capabilities that work where it matters.”

The company has begun signing early agreements with users in France, Germany, Ukraine, and the United States, and is in discussions with leading drone manufacturers in NATO countries and in Ukraine to integrate Agent 001 as a standard payload on next-generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms. Sky Spy plans to establish production lines in Europe and Ukraine as it shifts from limited pilots to scaled deployments.

Sky Spy’s long-term vision is to expand from a single drone payload into a multi-domain SIGINT provider, bringing RF awareness to air, ground, sea, and space systems. As Ukraine’s defense-tech sector accelerates under wartime pressure, the company represents a growing wave of battlefield-proven technologies now moving toward global adoption.