A startup founded by Ukrainian technologists has raised some pre-seed funding to expand beyond the battleground on its home turf in the fight against Russia.
Sky Spy — which has developed a small AI-based signal intelligence (SIGINT) system that can be used with drones working in electronic warfare and other contested environments — has picked up $1.6 million, money that it will be using to build out its product, start production on what it already has developed, and hire talent.
The startup says that its tech has already been test driven by active military units in Ukraine to find hostile signal emitters such as UAS control stations and jammers.
“Sky Spy was built by people who’ve seen how unreliable intelligence costs lives,” said Arsenii Hurtavtsov, the founder and CEO of Sky Spy, in a statement. “Our mission is simple: to give forces real-time awareness in the spectrum – because the side that dominates the spectrum dominates the war.”
The startup said it is already active across Europe and the United States and is talking with a number of drone and other UAS producers to integrate its technology into intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
Expeditions Fund and Superangel are co-leading the round, with participation also from Freedom Fund, Sunfish Partners, Crosscourt Ventures, and Material Ventures.
Sky Spy may be in the business of picking up information without being noticed, but the startup itself is catching attention at a time when there is a growing demand for better technology in radio frequency transmission and detection. Its backers are all familiar names in the world of defence tech investing, and the startup said the round was oversubscribed. (In other words, if things continue along or better than Sky Spy plans, expect to see more funding very soon.)
“From the first meeting, Sky Spy impressed us with their deep technical talent and real operational insight,” added Jaan Kokk, senior associate at Superangel said. “Their work aligns with the growing need across Europe and NATO for practical, rapidly deployable sensing capabilities. We believe they have the rare ability to move fast, solve hard problems, and deliver capabilities that work where it matters.”
Agent 001 reporting for duty
Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and that means that some of the most cutting-edge defence tech is coming out of the battlefield in Ukraine. Sky Spy is part of that trend.
Airspace in the country is contested and congested for two main reasons: the first is that many of the communications systems and weapons that forces on both sides are using rely on wireless frequencies to operate, creating a hodgepodge of civilian, military and commercial transmitters and transmissions (some of which are also being used for non-battle reasons); and the second is that this has given rise to an unprecedented amount of electronic warfare to tap into and disrupt those frequencies.
The result is that when it comes to clearing the airwaves, many existing SIGINT systems do not work reliably and quickly to triangulate where enemy transmitters are in order to take them out more accurately.
Sky Spy’s first product is in answer to that problem. Agent 001 is integrated into drones to turn them “into autonomous spectrum hunters,” the company said, with on-device capability to read and respond both to radio frequency signals and visual confirmation.
Agent 001 “detects, classifies, and localises radio emitters in real time” using filtering algorithms, RF hardware and combat data. Critically, all the processing is carried out on the device itself — rather than needing to rely on transmission itself to a separate server. Agent 001 weighs 500g and sells for a “fraction” of the price of other SIGINT platforms designed to be incorporated into UAVs, the company said.
The battlefields of Ukraine are physically a tangle of fibre-optic cables these days, one more basic approach to bypassing the RF mess of electronic warfare. But wireless remains an major part of the approach and it was inevitable that there would be a new wave of startups building tech to supersede the issues in wireless today.
The primary focus of Sky Spy right now might be in identifying radio emitters to target them more accurately, but there is potential to expand that to further applications. The immediate and longer-term use cases likely both caught investors’ attention.
It’s also notable as an example of Ukrainian technologists building businesses that are able to attract venture funding.
“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, in a statement. “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. The team is highly motivated, brings strong credentials from their prior work on C2 systems, and has already validated their solution with end users. We look forward to supporting their international expansion.”
