Every year from October through March, Ukraine braces for what drone operators call ‘Shahed season.’ Longer nights and heavier cloud cover bring more intense attacks on Ukrainian cities, and they expose a weakness at the heart of modern air defence.
Militaries are swapping multi-million-dollar missiles for low-cost interceptor drones, but most still rely on optical and thermal cameras that go blind in rain, fog, smoke and snow, where visibility can drop by up to 80% beyond a few dozen metres. And the threat is getting faster, with jet-powered Shaheds that typical interceptors can no longer catch.
Marcin Kovalevskij saw that gap up close. After talking with Ukrainian combat officers at the European Defence Tech Hackathon in London in 2025, he started working on a fix: first on weekends from Lithuania, funding the early work himself. Then, once he’d saved enough, he packed his equipment into two suitcases and moved to Kyiv to set up an R&D lab. For his first five months there, he slept on the floor of a factory that had previously taken missile hits.
By October 2026, Valkyrie Dynamics had a working prototype and joined Hexa Sprint Defense, our acceleration programme for European defence and dual-use startups, as its first Ukrainian team.
Valkyrie’s answer to ‘Shahed season’ is Heimdall, a miniature terminal guidance radar seeker that sits in the nose cone of FPV interceptors and autonomous interception platforms. Once airborne, an interceptor only knows roughly where its target is. In the final kilometre, the operator usually navigates by thermal camera, which works fine until the clouds roll in. In the last 100 to 500 metres, Heimdall gives the operator a radar view instead, using radio-frequency waves that cut through conditions cameras can’t, so they can still see the target and engage it.
“Our mission is to make mass-scale air defence more affordable and expendable. We want to replace $3M missiles with low-cost drone interceptors guided by more accessible radar technology. Giving these systems better sensors, and eventually fusing those with other components, is what will push the next stage of drone interception.” (Marcin Kovalevskij, founder and CEO of Valkyrie Dynamics)
Key proof points:
- Around 100 grams, with a target price below €300 per unit at volume, while competitors build expensive ground radars or heavy civil drone sensors
- Works for both piloted FPV navigation and autonomous flight when paired with a partner’s guidance module, with the final decision to engage staying with a human pilot or the manufacturer’s own systems
- Built and field-tested in Kyiv alongside frontline operators, so hardware iterates in days rather than months
- Recent flight tests with Korven Systems, a Ukrainian-Estonian developer of autonomy systems for interceptor drones, and integration underway with interceptor manufacturers and guidance module builders in Ukraine
Valkyrie has raised a €1M pre-seed round from us alongside defence tech angel investors. The funding will go towards manufacturing the first version of Heimdall, developing next-generation seekers with longer detection range and a wider field of view, and growing the team. Valkyrie also plans to open European technical integration hubs in late 2026 to serve NATO procurement programmes, and, further out, to bring its radar technology to ground vehicles and other unmanned platforms.
“At Hexa Sprint Defense we build companies alongside founders, from the first customer to the first factory. Valkyrie is solving a problem every European army is about to face: drones that hide in the weather. They’re building it from Kyiv, where the feedback loop is measured in days, not years.” (Guillaume Lerouge, Partner at Hexa VC)
Marcin has already shown what he’s willing to do to get this right. We’re proud to be building alongside him and the Valkyrie team, and we can’t wait to see Heimdall flying at scale. 💙
Learn more about Valkyrie Dynamics.