Wild Hornets

Wild Hornets is a Ukrainian volunteer charity, founded in spring 2023, that designs and mass-produces first-person-view strike drones and funds itself entirely through private donations rather than investment or state contracts. Its best-known product, the 3D-printed Sting interceptor, is built to chase down and destroy incoming Shahed-type attack drones, and the organisation credits it with thousands of kills across the war.

The group runs lean — a few dozen engineers — and has scaled production sharply, reporting output in the thousands of units a month. One point worth keeping straight: fully automated targeting is still a work in progress. The current Sting intercept is flown manually by a pilot using thermal cameras, while the autonomy components — drone-to-drone coordination and target recognition — are being developed in cooperation with the state-backed BRAVE1 cluster rather than deployed today. The organisation’s kill totals are its own figures, widely cited but self-reported.