London-based defence-technology company UFORCE is in advanced talks to raise about $500 million in a round led by Antonio Gracias' Valor Equity Partners, valuing the maker of Ukraine's combat-proven MAGURA sea drones at roughly $5 billion, Bloomberg reported on September 7, 2026.
A five-fold jump since March
The talks come just six months after UFORCE emerged from stealth in March 2026 with a $50 million seed round at a valuation above $1 billion — a raise led by Lakestar that made the company the first defence-tech unicorn founded in either Ukraine or the United Kingdom. Bloomberg's sources cautioned that terms could still change before the round closes.
Valor Equity Partners, whose founder sits on the SpaceX board, has become one of the most active backers of dual-use industrial and defence hardware. Prior UFORCE investors include Lakestar, Shield Capital and Ballistic Ventures, and the company said in the spring that its 2025 bookings had already grown 450% year over year to the hundreds of millions of dollars.
MAGURA sea drones, ground robots and counter-UAS
UFORCE was co-founded in 2024 by former People.ai chief executive Oleg Rogynskyy and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksii Honcharuk, with former UK Defence Secretary Sir Ben Wallace on its board. The company unifies nine Ukrainian teams behind a single, NATO-compatible open architecture, and its flagship product is the MAGURA family of unmanned surface vessels — vehicles Ukrainian intelligence has used to strike more than a dozen Russian warships in the Black Sea and, in May 2025, to shoot down manned Su-30 fighter jets with AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles.
Beyond MAGURA: Nemesis, Bucha and Sunray
Alongside MAGURA, UFORCE builds the Nemesis strike UAV, the Lyut ground combat system, the Sunray laser counter-drone platform and the SICH/C2 command layer. In March 2026 it unveiled Bucha, a middle-strike-class kamikaze drone with a range of up to 200 km. In July 2026 it announced a joint venture with US boatbuilder ReconCraft to produce MAGURA V7s inside the United States.
Defence-tech capital keeps compounding
The UFORCE talks land in a market that has kept re-pricing battlefield-tested unmanned systems upward. Saronic closed a $1.75 billion round at a $9.25 billion valuation earlier in the year, and Germany's Quantum Systems raised $1.2 billion in July for autonomous surveillance drones. Hadrian's $1.37B raise in August at $7.87 billion signalled that Valor-adjacent investors were still writing very large cheques for defence factories, and the UFORCE round would be one of the largest single rounds ever raised by a European defence-tech unicorn.
Reporting based on coverage from Bloomberg, Reuters and UNITED24 Media.