Ukraine’s “Swarmer” Just Raised $15 Million to Supercharge AI Combat Swarms

Plus a deeper look at how drone swarms work

Licensed by the author from Envato Elements

There’s an ongoing debate in the analyst community about the future of warfare. Some of my colleagues say that the war in Ukraine has proven that all you need are cheap drones for short range and cruise missiles to reach out and touch someone.

Others say autonomy, AI, and robotic systems are the future.

Still other friends are dead-set on maintaining the hyper-expensive weapon systems like the F-35.

The truth is likely a combination of cheap and expensive, manned and autonomous in various ratios to find the sweet spot of 21^st Century warfare. But one thing I have not discussed often is the swarm scenario.

So, let’s talk about drone swarms in detail and how Ukraine is, once again, leading the way.

Ukraine doesn’t always invent first. But what it does more reliably than most is invent fast. The news out this week: Ukrainian defense start-up Swarmer raised $15 million to push toward intelligent, autonomous drone swarms.

Let’s dig into how military swarms really work (not the drone-show variety), where Swarmer is pushing the envelope, the tension between autonomy and human control, and how this effort could ripple across the battlefield faster than you think.

Swarms are adaptive kill chains

Swarms are a purpose-built, adaptive kill chain with the manners of a nightclub bouncer, the patience of a chess player, and the ruthlessness of a Roomba that found a grenade.

Put another way, a swarm is not a group of drones, it is a distributed weapon system that senses, decides, and acts, often faster than any human in the loop can finish mocha latte.

It starts with the eyes, ears, and nose, that is, the sensing layer. Individual drones carry different sensors, some optical, some thermal, some acoustic, some simple line scanners.

One drone sees a chimney stack belching smoke, another hears an engine signature out on the pier, a third notices a heat anomaly near a logistics truck.

The swarm shares those micro-observations, glues them together, and suddenly what was a bunch of fuzzy pixels becomes a target profile.

This fused picture is the raw material of the kill chain.

Mesh style comms

Next comes the networking and shared brain.

Modern swarms run on mesh-style comms and local AI, not a single fragile radio link. That means if one drone is shot, jammed, or hacked, the rest keep working, rerouting commands, and recalculating plans on the fly.

Actually, I think this warrants a deeper look at mesh comms before we discuss swarms:

A mesh network is a many-to-many radio fabric. Instead of one drone talking back to a single ground station and failing if that link drops, every node can relay traffic for others.

If Node A can’t reach the base directly, it talks to Node B, which talks to Node C, and so on. That gives you redundancy, dynamic routing, and a much bigger operational bubble than a simple point-to-multipoint radio.