Thermopylae Aerospace Raises $1.6M to Build Low-Cost Interceptor Drones for Ukraine’s Air Defense

KYIV, Ukraine — 1 December 2025

Thermopylae Aerospace, a Ukrainian-led interceptor drone startup founded by 21-year-old engineer Yehor Balytskyi, has raised $1.6 million in pre-seed funding to develop and test a new low-cost air defense platform for Ukraine.

The round was led by investor Naval Ravikant, with participation from Founders, Inc., UA1 VC, Norgard Capital, and angel investors from SGA Capital, Cyrus Ventures and others, according to the company. In announcing the funding, Balytskyi described the company’s mission as delivering “new capabilities to our air defense groups with a novel interceptor platform.”

Thermopylae is developing an ultra-light, foldable quadcopter interceptor designed to counter glide bombs and Group 2 drones such as Shaheds. Launched from a standard mortar-like tube, the system uses thermal guidance and an electric motor to reach speeds of up to 350 km/h with a targeted flight time of up to 20 minutes. The expected unit price is under $10,000, and the interceptor is designed to be partially reusable if it crashes without striking a target.

Balytskyi framed the technology as part of a broader economic and security vision.

“We believe air-defense systems are the core assets of the future free world,” he said. “A golden dome built on commodities traded like gold can unlock new markets that empower the West, turn aggression into an economic impossibility, make peace the most profitable path.”

Balytskyi left Ukraine at 17 after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and later worked in Europe on cybersecurity, cryptography, and distributed systems. After completing the Entrepreneurs First accelerator in London, he moved to the United States earlier this year. He met co-founder Carter Scherer in June, and after participating in several national security hackathons together, the pair launched Thermopylae later that month. They secured an initial check from San Francisco–based accelerator Founders, Inc., and soon after demoed a working prototype to investors and soldiers in Nevada.

The team is integrating its interceptor with widely used Ukrainian command-and-control and situational awareness systems to reduce barriers to adoption. That approach differs from many U.S. counter-drone systems focused on centralized technologies such as high-energy lasers, static gun platforms, or electronic warfare tools.

UA1 VC joined the round after reviewing the team’s early prototyping progress.

“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 said. “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.” He noted that both he and Balytskyi are Ukrainian and focused on “solving one of the most significant problems of modern warfare: stopping low-cost, high-volume deep-strike threats.”

With the funding secured, Thermopylae plans to relocate operations to Ukraine, begin testing the interceptor with frontline units and build out early manufacturing capacity. Balytskyi said the team wants to ensure the product is validated under real battlefield conditions.

“There are so many solutions out there against drones that never deploy in an actual battlefield,” he 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.”

Thermopylae’s raise comes as Ukrainian defense-tech startups compete for a growing pool of public and private capital dedicated to countering Russia’s air campaign. Separately, Ukrainian startup M-Fly recently secured $1.4 million through the Brave1 defense innovation platform to scale its camera stabilization systems for reconnaissance drones.

By combining a low-cost interceptor with partial reusability and integration into existing battle management systems, Thermopylae aims to offer militaries a more sustainable way to counter mass drone and glide-bomb attacks — threats that continue to pressure Ukraine’s air defenses.