Abto Software

Abto Software is a Lviv-based software development house founded in 2007, originally serving Western clients across web, healthcare and computer-vision projects. Like a number of Ukrainian software firms after February 2022, it has spun out a dedicated defence division — published at defencetech.abtosoftware.com — that channels its computer-vision and machine-learning experience into modules for unmanned systems. The company has not named a public head for the defence arm.

The defence catalogue is narrow and deliberately so. Abto’s marketing centres on two modules. The first is an AI package for first-person-view drones that handles terminal targeting: once a pilot designates a target on the operator’s screen, an optical-flow tracker is meant to keep the target locked through the last seconds of flight, including when it is partially camouflaged or obscured by smoke. The second is an optical drone-navigation module that uses vision odometry and machine-learning positioning to keep a UAV on mission when satellite navigation is jammed, spoofed or unavailable. Both, according to the company, are designed to run on the small on-board processors that strike drones can carry.

These are not abstract problems. Russian electronic warfare blankets the front line with GNSS jamming, and FPV pilots routinely lose video link in the final seconds of an attack run — the moment when terminal guidance has to take over. Ukrainian units, foundations and integrators have spent the past two years asking for exactly this combination: an on-board model that finishes the run once the human can no longer steer, and an alternative to GPS that lets a drone reach its release point in the first place. Several Ukrainian software houses are working the same problem from different angles, including The Fourth Law, Dwarf Engineering and DoD Solution.

Specific deployments, customers and contract values are not public. Abto Software does not disclose which Ukrainian Armed Forces units operate its modules, which drone airframes integrate them, or what battlefield data, if any, has been collected from the field. The wider commercial side of the business — its outsourcing work for foreign clients — remains the larger part of the company by revenue and headcount, on the available evidence.

Within Ukraine’s drone-software ecosystem Abto sits in a specific niche: an established commercial software house that has redirected an existing computer-vision team toward strike-drone autonomy, rather than a defence start-up built from scratch around the war. That route — civilian engineering talent crossing over rather than scaling up — is one of the quieter patterns in how Ukraine has built its drone-software stack.