The Fourth Law, a defence tech startup founded in Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s invasion, has gained traction in its home country over the last couple of years for its drones and related AI technology. Now, the company is announcing its first outside funding from a mix of investors from the US, Canada, Switzerland, Finland, and Spain.
The startup’s founder and CEO, Yaroslav Azhnyuk, is a serial entrepreneur with peripatetic inclinations and wide-ranging connections. His previous startups have ranged from fintechs through to consumer hardware for monitoring and interacting remotely with your pet — the latter concept landing Azhnyuk at Y Combinator a decade ago, the first team from Ukraine ever to participate in the famous startup accelerator.
We have confirmed that it will be using the funding both to continue development and sales of its current range of products, as well as to begin exploring dual-use cases for enterprise applications.
The Fourth Law has several products already under its belt.
Its two flagship devices — the Lupynis-10-TFL-1 unmanned aircraft system (UAS) drone and the a TFL-1 autonomy module that can be used with third-party aircraft — have gained traction, it said, in the category of first-person vision (FPV) drones, “more than doubling mission success rates while increasing costs by only 10-20%.” (It doesn’t disclose costs, nor what percentage of missions are typically successful.)
The tech is capable of “overcoming EW jamming, acquiring, and striking targets in challenging conditions,” according to Colonel Ruslan Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
There are dozens of third-party companies already integrating TFL-1 tech into their systems, Azhnyuk added.
Urgent need meets consumer-style usability
In a fascinating interview earlier this year, Azhnyuk described how the startup was born out of the need he saw on the front line, but also his background in consumer technology.
Namely on the defence front, the company addresses one of the most important problems in unmanned warfighting – jamming.
The Russian Army has been investing heavily in electronic warfare capabilities since the Cold War, and that has meant that on the front line in the war in Ukraine, Electronic Warfare is both a major challenge and the focus of serious innovation. This topic is sensitive, and is at the heart of a battle that means life or death for soldiers in the field.
And no one working in the middle of a conflict would ever claim that the problem has been “solved.” Similar to the endless cat-and-mouse race in cybersecurity, ask any radio technician and they will tell you that there is no such thing as un-jammable communications — only that a jammer not powerful enough.
The Fourth Law takes a different approach to Electronic Warfare, an approach encoded into its name. The Fourth Law is a reference to the Three Laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov. Azhnyuk’s startup seeks the fourth, — yet undiscovered — law by increasing the autonomy of the drones.
The company’s TFL-1 module autonomously performs terminal guidance on kamikaze FPV drones during the last 500 meters of the flight. Usually, it is within this range that electronic warfare equipment, installed at the target, can prevent communications between the drone and its pilot. TFL-1 combats this by using AI for this last part of the flight to remove the need for that communication back to the pilot.
Meanwhile, the Fourth Law’s own drone the Lupynis-10, can travel 30 kilometers with a 1kg payload and has TFL-1 built in.
When it comes to taking cues from Azhnyuk’s consumer experience, that’s a little more straightforward.
In a previous life, prior to the full-scale invasion, Azhnyuk was best known for Petcube, a startup that proved pivotal to the emergence of pet-tech. Petcube raised $24 million, mostly from US venture funds. Azhnyuk’s key takeaways from that experience were clear: make tech that is intuitive and thus easier to use, and that is urgently needed, and the rest will follow.
‘At Petcube I was spending months and years proactively fundraising’, Azhnyuk told Resilience Media earlier this year. ‘Here I spent about 20 days being proactive, and then we just worked with incoming interest.’
Indeed, these days in Ukraine, he added, founders should be spending their time on ‘engineering and product rather than educating uninterested investors about the market and the opportunity.’
Future frontiers
The next technical step for products like these will be to add the ability to drop payloads and then return for another mission.
Future rounds of investment may also help build target acquisition as well as see the products adapted for fixed-wing platform or missiles systems, as well as for land-to-air or air-to-air use cases.
Yet The Fourth Law does not want to limit itself to the Ukrainian market. While the Ukrainian government is slowly opening up the export of Ukrainian defence technologies, The Fourth Law already has offices in the US, the UK, and EU in anticipation of a green light to expand there, Azhnyuk told us
But Azhnyuk is under no illusions about the long road ahead. He has regularly pointed out that the total amount raised by Petcube roughly equals the total amount of foreign direct investment into Ukrainian startups building defence products.
The round raised by The Fourth Law is not a sign of change. ‘The funding across the market is still at ridiculously low levels, which are in stark contrast to the size of the opportunity’ said Azhnyuk in an interview.
The hope is that once export controls are lifted, this generation of experienced tech founders and technologists will have the opportunity to continue to attract serious foreign capital to develop businesses that reach beyond the immediate needs of the war they are fighting right now. The Fourth Law believes that it could become a part of that new guard.
