BRAVE1

BRAVE1 is the coordination hub at the centre of Ukraine’s wartime defence-technology boom. Launched by the Ukrainian government in 2023, it is a state-backed cluster that brings together the defence ministry, the general staff, the digital-transformation ministry, and the fast-growing population of private drone, robotics, and software companies feeding the front. Rather than building weapons itself, it connects the people who do — pairing startups with grants, technical expertise, and, crucially, a route to testing with real military units and into state procurement.

For a young company, passing through BRAVE1 has become something close to a rite of passage. The cluster issues development grants — often modest sums that nonetheless validate a product — and runs a “Test in Ukraine” track that lets foreign and domestic developers trial their systems against the dense electronic-warfare conditions of the war. Many of the companies profiled on this site, from the swarm-software firm Swarmer to the guidance-systems maker M-Fly and the interceptor charity Wild Hornets , have moved through it.

BRAVE1 sits in an unusual category: it is neither a company nor a conventional defence agency, but a deliberate piece of state machinery designed to turn a chaotic, bottom-up surge of battlefield innovation into something the armed forces can actually buy and field at scale. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a government trying to institutionalise the lessons of drone warfare in real time.