When we connected for this interview, Yaroslav Azhnyuk was calling from Kyiv. The previous day, another strike had hit Ukraine’s infrastructure, leaving him without electricity at home. We recorded the interview, and after the call, he planned to head to the office—one of the few places still with electricity.

That context is more than a backdrop. It shapes how Ukrainian entrepreneurs think about technology, manufacturing, and the pace of innovation. In this conversation, Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of Odd Systems and The Fourth Law, explains his transition from consumer hardware to defense systems.

He also shares why autonomy and local supply chains will shape the coming decades, and what needs to change for Ukrainian defense technology to scale across Europe.

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length while preserving meaning.

Who Are You and What Are You Working On?

I’m an entrepreneur born and raised here in Kyiv, Ukraine. I’ve been building different tech companies since I was 18, and I’m 37 now. One of the larger companies I built before the full-scale invasion was Petcube, the world’s leader in smart pet devices, pet cameras, GPS trackers, and software.

I lived in Silicon Valley for six years, raised money from some of the top venture funds, and went through Y Combinator in 2016.

I went back to Ukraine as my main place of residence in 2020, and then two years later, Russia invaded Ukraine. That fundamentally changed my entrepreneurial journey. I decided to step down from all my previous business activities and focus on fulfilling my duty as a man protecting my country, doing what I do best: building tech businesses.

So I passed the baton as CEO of Petcube to my successor and founded these two companies, which I am currently engaged with. One of them is called Odd Systems, a company that makes cameras mostly for drones. Our thermal cameras for night vision are probably the world’s best for large-scale use in drones, including FPV drones, interceptors, and reconnaissance drones.

And the second company I founded and now run as CEO is called The Fourth Law. The Fourth Law is named after Asimov’s three laws of robotics and aims to develop robust, fully autonomous systems for the field of defense robotics.

Our product video, available on the website, is the world’s first AI-killer drones used systematically on the battlefield. They’re being used in Ukraine very actively, and there are many other use cases we don’t publicize.

How Was The Switch From Consumer Tech To Military Tech?

It depends on your worldview and personality as an entrepreneur. Was it easy for a million Ukrainians to switch from their civil life to volunteer for the army? It wasn’t. It wasn’t smooth for anyone. Changing your life completely is not smooth.

But when your country is under attack, when Ukrainian children are being kidnapped, your friends are being killed, your women are being raped, when your territory is being taken from you, that’s the only logical thing you can do.

Unfortunately, the war is much closer to Europe now than it was four years ago. I think many people ought to start asking themselves these questions. So it’s a good time for our European friends to make that switch in their minds without waiting for the crisis to happen.

The most difficult shift is the mental switch of doing weapons, doing something that can kill other human beings, something that shoots, that explodes. That was a mental shift, because many in our generation grew up with a pacifist worldview.

We didn’t think a big war was possible or that we would be soldiers. It was something distant. And now it’s suddenly very real.

You start asking yourself all these questions. Am I ready to start making weapons? What does it mean? Is this a special responsibility? In fact, we’re making tools that other people use. There is responsibility for how you make the tool.

But if we won’t be making these tools, if those people won’t be doing their job, then maybe we won’t have a life. Maybe we won’t have a home. Maybe we won’t have electricity. Maybe our airports won’t function.

When you go through this process step by step internally, it’s pretty easy to understand that this is probably the thing you ought to be doing as a man. And if you are not doing it now, when your country and society are in danger, then you will be ashamed to look your children in the eyes some years later. So in the end, it was a pretty easy decision.

How Did Odd Systems Start?

Ideas are usually a combination of things that you know how to do, things that other people need, and things you feel passionate about. With Petcube, which sold over a million pet cameras in its lifetime, we really knew how to make cameras.

And it appears that a camera that throws treats to your dog and a camera that throws explosives to bad guys who came to kill and steal your land are pretty similar cameras.

So there was experience, passion, and a dire need, and that’s how this emerged.

The challenge with thermal cameras is that Europe as a whole produces between 400,000 and 500,000 thermal camera sensors per year. Eighty percent of that is one French company, Lynred, and the rest is maybe five more startups.

Ukraine consumes that amount, four to five hundred thousand camera sensors, in four to five months. So, obviously, Ukraine doesn’t buy that from Europe; it buys it from China.

And the sensor is not the only part of a camera. You need a sensor, a lens, covers, cables, a digital signal processor, and a lot of elaborate software that goes into the casing and mounts it on the end device.

The sensors are made of semiconductors and electronics, so they can be produced in Europe. But for the same reasons as everything else, it’s been outsourced to China and, to a lesser extent, to the US.

We’re not making our own sensors yet, but we’re working on it. We’re building a factory that will triple or more European capacity. Currently, we take off-the-shelf sensors and electronics and combine them with our own software and product expertise.

We tailor everything to the needs of the modern, drone-enabled battlefield. The result is Kurbas, which has become the camera of choice for FPV and interceptor drones. Such drones protect our cities from Russian Shaheds.

A couple of months ago, over a thousand Shaheds were intercepted using our cameras. By now, we can safely say it’s in the thousands. Each of these is someone’s apartment spared, someone’s life saved, a bunch of buildings having electricity because the drone didn’t hit the infrastructure. It feels very meaningful.

How Do You Think About Financing the Company at This Stage?

Fortunately, I was able to invest some of my own money into this, and it turned out to be a good investment. I haven’t lost the money so far. We have some investments, but they haven’t been crucial so far in building both businesses.

The surprising thing about the current Ukrainian defense market, and I think it applies to some extent to the European market in general, is that oftentimes it is easier to make money by selling your product than by fundraising.

If you can kick it off with relatively small funding and launch a usable product, then dedicating a unit of time as an executive to sales makes more sense than dedicating the same unit of time to fundraising. It’s very different from my previous experience, where I spent an enormous amount of time fundraising and somewhat regretted it.

Here, you spend your time building a product, talking to your customers, building the features they want, shipping, seeing results, and getting paid for it. There is a 25 percent margin ceiling on products you sell to the Ukrainian government, but this ceiling allows you to grow the business, including growth teams.

We also have governmental grants. They’re not huge, like between $50,000 and, in exceptional cases, a couple of million dollars, but it helps.

The cost of doing business and labor costs in Ukraine are lower than in the US. For the money it takes you to build one factory in the US, you can build a dozen here. For software engineering, salaries are a fraction of those in Silicon Valley. The cost of living is also lower.

And yes, we do have funding from some prominent European and American investors. Funding is important to us not for the money itself, but for the expertise it brings and the access to international markets.

We’re seeing that the world will rearm over the coming decades. Ukraine has become the Defense Valley, the center of global defense innovation, and we have products that our partners need. We would love to share those as we scale and become able to respond to our partners in the EU and the US.

If You Were Starting Again Today, Would You Still Build Odd Systems And The Fourth Law?

Absolutely. There’s so much opportunity in this space. Even two years after I started these companies and four years after the full-scale invasion, it’s day one. 

The next couple of decades in defense will be defined by autonomy and mass manufacturing of autonomous systems on air, sea, and land, and I would emphasize mass manufacturing, something that we need to rediscover. 

It will also be defined by the federalization of supply chains and a greater reliance on locally sourced components, minerals, machines to process these minerals, know-how, technologies, software, AIs, etc.

What we’re seeing now is just a very small glimpse. I expect things to get much worse before they get better. It will be defined by the march of AI, first in software and then in hardware. Many AIs used now in hardware and defense are similar to those from 10 to 15 years ago: image recognition and classification. 

Whereas the AIs we’re used to in software, large language models, and so on, are yet to make their way into practical robotics. But when they do, robotic systems can plan and make decisions on their own, not Skynet-style, but for encapsulated problems, and react in milliseconds, while humans react in hours or days.

If we see something remotely close to what we think AGI could look like, that would be another major step. Developing AIs in defense is the Manhattan Project of today. Developing sovereign manufacturing capabilities for key components is the new oil.

That’s what we’re working on. Autonomy, massively scaled autonomy, and supply chain sovereignty, starting with cameras. And I’d like to encourage anyone who reads this to do the same switch. There is a great need for more entrepreneurs in the European defense sector. And it’s going to define the future of you and your children.

What Would Make Exporting Ukrainian Defense Tech Into Europe Easier?

It’s legislation on the Ukrainian side, and our European partners can nudge our government and partner on these issues.

Currently, there are a handful of companies in Ukraine that are designated exporters and are authorized to export. They work as gatekeepers, are quite old-school, and aren’t always the fastest. That’s the only legally accessible way to export goods developed in Ukraine.

Ukrainian companies, including ours, are establishing international entities, opening international offices, and developing international manufacturing capabilities, but that entails extra work, overhead, and delays. If we were able to export directly from Ukraine to EU countries, it would make things more dynamic and faster.

It would encourage Western capital to invest in entities that cooperate in Ukraine, not necessarily Ukrainian legal entities, but companies with a Ukrainian presence. That would accelerate capital flow and human capital as well. Everyone would win from Ukraine, and Europe harmonized this legal framework so Ukrainian defense companies can sell to the EU more easily.

Other than that, frankly, we need Europeans to wake up. The mood here in Ukraine is that we were exactly where Europe is now. Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, we were in denial, we didn’t want to leave our old lives behind, we didn’t want change, and we didn’t want to believe anything bad could happen.

Europe has been hearing wake-up call after wake-up call, but keeps hitting snooze. I really wish Europe would take this seriously and start executing.

After visiting and talking to people in France, the UK, and Germany, I see the same impressions among other Ukrainian defense entrepreneurs and officials. People feel sad and disappointed that Europe is not taking the threats seriously, and, in some way, helpless, as if we don’t know what else we can do to wake you up.