— $700 million at a valuation of $6 billion: UFORCE, the Ukrainian company behind MAGURA naval drones, closed a Series A co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the U.K.'s National Wealth Fund.
— From war to the global factory: the money goes to distributed production in the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, with systems already proven in combat.
— The nuance: the combat figures (more than a dozen ships destroyed, 300,000 flights) are reported by the company itself and are not independently verified.

UFORCE, a defense technology company founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, today announced a Series A of $700 million at a valuation of $6 billion, according to the official statement. The round is co-led by Valor Equity Partners and the National Wealth Fund of the United Kingdom, with participation from the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of the United States and Ukraine.

The company builds autonomous unmanned platforms by sea, land and air, in addition to the artificial intelligence software and command and control layer that operates them. Its thesis is straightforward: to make defense cost a hundred times less than offensive. Its catalog includes the MAGURA family of unmanned ships, the NEMESIS family of attack platforms, the LIUT family of ground robots, the PREDATOR family of turrets against drones and the C2 software that coordinates it all.

The MAGURA have become the flagship product: according to the company, they have contributed to the destruction of more than a dozen Russian warships in the Black Sea and have shot down helicopters and fighter jets. Ukrainian forces also use them as a mobile maritime base to launch NEMESIS drones in long-range attacks. The NEMESIS, on the other hand, total more than 300,000 combat flights and are adopted by more than 100 units. These are figures from the company itself, not independently verified, as DroneLife warns.

The money is not only going to manufacture more units, but to share production: the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, close to the theaters where the systems are needed and with the capacity to maintain supply even if attacks on infrastructure in Ukraine continue. In the United States, UFORCE announced a partnership with ReconCraft to scale up the manufacture of the MAGURA, and in the United Kingdom the National Wealth Fund supports the expansion of engineering and manufacturing. The company is also a founding member of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance and works within the NATO and Joint Expeditionary Force networks.

The signing accompanying the round is retired Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and partner at Valor Equity Partners, who joins the UFORCE board. "Ukraine has shown the world how fast innovation can move on the battlefield when engineers work side-by-side with those who depend on its systems," Cavoli said. UFORCE CEO Oleg Rogynskyy summed it up this way: "This investment will help us scale production for Ukraine and bring allies solutions that they can deploy, integrate and sustain at the speed of modern combat."

For Latin America, the UFORCE case matters because of the cost, not because of the battlefront. The region's militaries buy almost all of their defense systems abroad, and the thesis of cheap, combat-proven autonomous platforms changes the conversation about what a country that is not a military power can afford. Mexico, in particular, already has aerospace clusters and advanced manufacturing capacity, in Querétaro and Baja California among others, which in the United States and Europe are being converted for defense. The question is whether the region wants to be only a buyer of these systems or also part of its production chain.

What is NOT covered: There are no per-unit prices for any platform, no detailed technical specifications, no contracts announced with specific governments, and no independent verification of the combat figures reported by the company.

What's next: the start of MAGURA production in the US with ReconCraft, the expansion of engineering in the UK, the next steps of the EU-Ukraine Drone Alliance and whether the valuation of 6,000 million is sustained in the next round.

Sources and credits: UFORCE / PR Newswire | Tech.eu | DroneLife. Cover image: UFORCE, via PR Newswire.