Valkyrie Dynamics, a defense startup with a research lab in Kyiv and headquarters in Lithuania, raised a €1 million pre-seed round led by Paris-based venture studio Hexa, the company said on November 10, 2026. The money will fund production of Heimdall, a roughly 100-gram onboard radar seeker designed to help low-cost interceptor drones find their targets when cameras can't see through bad weather.
Founder and CEO Marcin Kovalevskij, an engineering physicist who previously built electronics and embedded flight systems at CNRS and Exotrael, started the company after an EDTH London defense-tech hackathon in 2025. He spent the next five months sleeping on a factory floor in Kyiv while setting up Valkyrie's initial lab, a detail the company has leaned into as it builds its origin story alongside its hardware.
The problem: drones go blind in weather
Most low-cost interceptor drones rely on optical or thermal cameras, which lose roughly 80% of their effective range in rain, fog, smoke or snow. That gap matters more as Russia fields faster, jet-powered Shahed drone variants that conventional FPV interceptors struggle to catch even in good visibility, let alone bad. Heimdall is built to close that gap by using radio-frequency waves, which pass through weather that blinds cameras, giving both piloted FPV interceptors and fully autonomous platforms a way to keep tracking a target when the skies turn ugly.
Betting on cheap mass over expensive precision
Valkyrie's pitch rests on price as much as performance. The company is targeting a cost below €300 per unit at volume, a figure meant to keep pace with the economics of mass-produced FPV drones rather than the far pricier guided missiles typically used for air defense. Kovalevskij framed the goal directly: "Our mission is to make mass-scale air defence more affordable and expendable. We want to replace $3 million missiles with low-cost interceptors." Hexa partner Guillaume Lerouge said the company is tackling "a problem every European army is about to face: drones that hide in the weather," pointing to demand beyond Ukraine's immediate battlefield.
Valkyrie says it had a working Heimdall prototype by October 2026 and has already run flight tests with Korven Systems, a Ukrainian-Estonian autonomy developer, pairing the radar seeker with Korven's navigation stack. The company has also joined Hexa's Sprint Defense acceleration program, which should give it access to additional European defense-tech networks as it looks to scale production.
A crowded field racing toward the same problem
Valkyrie enters a European counter-drone market that has drawn heavy investment over the past year, much of it aimed at detecting and tracking incoming drones rather than building the seekers that let interceptors actually hit them in poor conditions. Heimdall's narrow focus on an all-weather seeker, rather than a full interceptor system, is designed to let it slot into other companies' airframes as a component rather than compete head-on with full-stack interceptor makers. With just €1 million raised so far, Valkyrie is still far from proving it can hit that sub-€300 price target at scale, but its early flight tests with Korven suggest the company is moving from pitch deck to hardware faster than its tiny funding round might suggest.