Swarmer Raises $15 Million in Series A Led by U.S. Investor — the Largest Defense-Tech Deal in Ukraine Since 2022
The funding will scale Swarmer’s AI-driven autonomy across diverse drones while reinforcing Ukraine’s role as a global center for defense innovation.
KYIV, Ukraine — 16 September 2025
Ukrainian drone-autonomy startup Swarmer closed a $15 million Series A led by U.S. investor Broadband Capital Investments, with participation from R-G.AI, D3 Ventures, Green Flag Ventures, Radius Capital and Network VC. The company characterized the deal as the single largest investment in a Ukrainian defense-tech company since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.
Founder and CEO Serhii Kupriienko said the company’s software “has proven itself in live combat across tens of thousands of missions,” and that the new capital will help deliver “advanced swarming capabilities to every unmanned vehicle, in Ukraine and across NATO-aligned nations.” He added that Western democracies should be able to field as many drones and robots as they can produce “without being constrained by the number of trained pilots.”
On its LinkedIn announcement, Swarmer thanked partners and supporters — including government program BRAVE1 — and said it is hiring as it expands deployments for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The company reiterated its approach to “proper, efficient autonomy with a human in the loop.”
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation, called it the largest defense-tech investment since the start of the war and said Ukraine is producing systems “with no global equivalents.” He said the funding will help integrate swarm capabilities across UAV fleets so that large numbers of drones and robots can be deployed without being limited by operator availability (translated from Ukrainian).
Swarmer positions itself as a hardware-agnostic, software-only layer that translates human-defined objectives into coordinated actions by multi-drone teams, trained on data from extensive combat sorties. The company says swarms have been demonstrated operating in GNSS-denied environments, with larger combined-arms demonstrations planned.
BRAVE1 — a government-run defense-innovation platform that coordinates funding, testing and commercialization support — has served as a launchpad for companies like Swarmer amid rapid wartime procurement cycles.
Michael Rapp, managing member at Broadband Capital Investments, said Swarmer’s “rapid pace of innovation is driven by real-world battlefield experience,” arguing the firm is well placed to become the software layer for next-generation autonomous systems as drone production scales globally.
Swarmer says the platform keeps humans responsible for life-or-death decisions while letting algorithms handle perception, coordination and split-second maneuvering — an architecture meant to satisfy both battlefield realities and emerging policy expectations around human oversight of lethal force.
