Serhii Kupriienko is the founder behind SWARMER, a Ukrainian defense tech company building the software layer that lets heterogeneous drones and robots operate as a coordinated group.

Rather than designing hardware, he focuses on the autonomy, orchestration, and safety systems that make “many vehicles, one mission” possible, especially in environments where communications are degraded and conditions change fast.

Operating in a wartime context has shaped both his priorities and his pace: reliability matters more than demos, and mistakes can scale quickly when you’re coordinating dozens of systems at once.

Beyond the technology, Serhii has also helped professionalize his company’s operations—emphasizing transparency, compliance, and execution as Swarmer expands from Ukraine into international markets.

What Is Swarmer?

At Swarmer, we don’t build drones. We build software and a bit of AI that allows different drones or robots to join a coordinated group and act together.

The idea is that you don’t micromanage each drone. You define goals, constraints, limitations, and sequences for the group, and the system adapts to changes in the environment and inputs. It executes the task in the most efficient way.

Where Do You Have the Most Traction Today?

We mostly work with larger drones — platforms that can carry payloads and deliver or drop things. Fixed-wing and multicopters. We also have some experience with ground vehicles and other systems. Right now, we’re working hard to move into the smaller-drone spectrum as well.

I don’t want to dive into combat application details, but that’s the general picture.

Why Are Smaller Drones Harder?

Small systems have much less power and payload capacity. It’s harder to add hardware, sensors, or extra compute for additional software. That’s why we started with the “big birds.” If it doesn’t work for larger platforms, it won’t work for small ones.

We proved it works on bigger systems — now adapting it to smaller ones makes sense.

How Do You Compare to Auterion?

It’s a tricky question, but we’re actually partners, and we work on different things.

They’re focused heavily on autonomy. We focus on enabling coordinated group behavior across many different systems. We connect drones, robots, ground stations, ground systems, and even potentially other assets so they operate together.

We’re more complementary than competitive.

How Do You Validate What You Build?

It’s everything: tabletop work, simulation, field testing, and then real-world deployment.

What makes autonomy and swarming much more difficult is this: with a normal drone, there’s usually a pilot, and there’s a mental model that if something goes wrong, a human can override and correct the situation.

With 25 drones flying above your head, if something goes wrong, there’s no way to “just jump in” and manually fix it.

That makes the cost of mistakes much higher. One software bug doesn’t mean losing one drone — it could mean losing five or ten, because the failure affects the group. So our bar for testing and safety has to be much higher than typical robotics.

How Close Are We to Reliable, Real-World Drone Swarming at Scale?

It’s years away.

In many areas, we don’t have mature “building blocks” to stand on. There are many things we still have to reinvent, test, iterate, and test again. I really respect the teams working in this direction, because we need many people pushing the field forward.

Also, multi-drone capability is basically impossible without strong single-drone autonomy first. And for ground vehicles, it’s still far from solved. Terrain navigation and obstacle navigation for ground drones, for example, there isn’t a great out-of-the-box solution.

Can Swarming Work in Harder Urban Environments?

It’s not necessarily harder; it’s different. It adds another dimension of complexity.

Ukraine is a specific kind of warfare. One issue is that many structures get destroyed completely. A building that exists this week might not exist next week.

So we’re solving one set of conditions now, but we have to adjust for different scenarios.

How Did You Become One of the Best-Funded Defense Tech Startups in Ukraine?

It wasn’t a smooth ride. It’s a combination of factors: hard work, focus, and a lot of attention to transparency, compliance, and building the company properly.

We didn’t treat it as “just build tech and everything else will follow.” We invested in structure and paperwork early, and that mattered.

Last year, we were named the most investable Ukrainian defense startup, and I’m grateful to my team for making that happen from zero. It also helps the whole ecosystem: if one company sets the bar, more startups and investors can find each other and build strong partnerships.

And I’m happy to share what we’ve learned. Startups visit, we talk, because there’s still a huge amount we all have to reinvent. This is defense — lives and missions are on the line.

What Keeps You Up at Night?

Air raid alerts, for sure.

But in terms of the company, at our current stage, the key risk is scaling. So our focus is execution. A normal challenge for a growing company, but it’s the main one.

How Do You Get the Best Talent?

We built a strong environment, and we’re very selective. Over the last few months, we hired dozens of people out of thousands of candidates.

For the right person, it’s a chance to work with a great team, in a strong company, and have a real impact.

If You Were Starting Over, What Would You Do Differently?

You always make mistakes, small and big, and that’s how you gain experience.

If I were starting a new company now (not restarting Swarmer), I’d look at components and sensing, especially non-optical detection, and related algorithms. That’s a major gap in the market.

I wouldn’t start “another drone company” in 2025 or 2026. The bigger opportunity is still in missing components: required sensors, required algorithms, and key enabling tech.

And the biggest advice is simple: choose your direction and keep laser focus. What you should build depends on the strengths of your team.

Ukraine vs Europe: Will Approaches Converge?

We started working with international markets about a year ago.

But Europe is not “one market.” The common point is NATO identifiers, and then everything else varies: compliance, certifications, procedures. The US is another world, too, with key buyers and different processes.

That’s a big contrast to Ukraine, where the requirement is basically: “We need something we can use.”