UForce, the Ukrainian founded defence technology company headquartered in London with hubs in Kyiv and Washington, has raised $700 million at a $6 billion valuation. The Series A round was co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the United Kingdom’s National Wealth Fund, with participation from the US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund and investors across Silicon Valley, Europe and Asia, Reuters reported.
The valuation has moved quickly. UForce raised $50 million at a valuation of around $1 billion in March, so the $6 billion mark represents roughly a sixfold step up in about eight months. Chief executive Oleg Rogynskyy told CNBC that the company’s bookings have more than doubled over the past year, from a base of several hundred million dollars, while declining to disclose exact figures.
The company develops unmanned aerial, maritime and land systems, together with the artificial intelligence software used to coordinate them. It says its NEMESIS drones have completed more than 300,000 combat flights and that its MAGURA naval vessels have contributed to the destruction of more than a dozen Russian warships in the Black Sea. Those are company statements, reported as such, and they are the operational record on which the valuation rests.
The new funding is to scale manufacturing in Ukraine and in allied countries, including the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. The round’s structure is the strategic point: a British state investment vehicle and a United States Ukraine reconstruction fund are not passive participants but co-lead and participant in a private valuation, which puts allied governments inside the capital structure of the drone supply chain they are also buying from.