Vyriy Drone

Vyriy Drone was founded in 2022 in Ukraine, in the months after Russia’s full-scale invasion turned small first-person-view drones into one of the most consequential weapons on the front. The company is led by Oleksii Babenko, who has become a recognisable voice for the wave of new Ukrainian manufacturers that stood up production lines to keep pace with battlefield consumption rates that no peacetime supplier could match.

The firm’s catalogue is built around FPV strike platforms in successive sizes and payload classes. Molfar is the flagship strike line; Johnny and Johnny PRO sit beside it as variants tuned for different range and warhead envelopes; Strip 2.1 is shaped for fortification work, where operators need to push a charge through a window or trench opening rather than chase a moving vehicle. In 2025 the company added MAX 15, a 15-inch airframe carrying up to eight kilograms over roughly thirty kilometres, intended for hardened Russian positions and rear-area logistics targets. The same year it introduced Dzhankoi, a ground vehicle with Starlink connectivity that carries up to six fibre-optic FPV drones forward for coordinated strikes — an attempt to push the launch point closer to the target without exposing the operator.

What sets Vyriy apart from most of the Ukrainian FPV cottage industry is its pursuit of a domestic supply chain. In December 2024 the company announced what it described as the first fully Ukrainian-made FPV drone — a 10-inch airframe built around Motor-G motors, a December1 video transmitter, an Odd Systems “Kurbas-256” thermal camera and a Ukrainian carbon-fibre frame. For a sector that had grown dependent on Chinese motors, flight controllers and video links, the announcement was a deliberate proof of concept: that an entire FPV strike drone could be sourced inside the country, insulated from the export controls and quiet shipment blocks that have repeatedly complicated procurement from Shenzhen.

Customers are, unsurprisingly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the various brigade- and battalion-level units that have integrated FPVs into their daily fire missions. Vyriy’s airframes have been documented in strikes on Russian armour, artillery and infantry positions across the front, and the firm has positioned itself as a long-term supplier rather than a wartime improviser. Production has scaled rapidly, in line with the broader Ukrainian shift toward serial manufacture of attritable systems.

The company sits inside a tight cluster of Ukrainian drone makers — alongside firms such as Fire Point and Skyeton — that have absorbed lessons from three years of attritional drone warfare and are now trying to translate those lessons into industrial output. Vyriy’s distinctive bet is vertical: rather than compete only on price or volume, it is buying into the local supply chain itself, on the assumption that whoever controls the components controls the production rate.