- Ukrainian Defense Tech NORDA Dynamics raised USD 150K Pre-Seed funding to scale its battlefield-ready autonomous UAV solutions
- Founded by experienced frontline volunteers, the team builds its tech with a heavy focus on real-world combat conditions
- Flagship products Underdog and Stablelink enable autonomous targeting and resilient drone navigation
- The company’s further plans include plans global expansion and dual-use applications, tackling export and tech integration challenges
This April, Ukrainian UAV startup NORDA Dynamics closed its Pre-Seed round of investment. The USD 150K funding came from Ukrainian Catholic University Foundation’s Angel One Fund.
Understanding the Problems from the Frontlines
Founded in 2023, NORDA Dynamics develops UAV autonomous control systems designed to operate effectively in electronic warfare environments and under conditions of unstable or no communication.
The startup’s founders bring a mix of deep technical expertise and over 10 years of frontline volunteering experience. Prior to founding the company, they had already been involved in Ukraine’s defense ecosystem—supporting frontline units with logistics, technology, and operational coordination since 2014. A whole decade of involvement gave them a profound understanding of real-life combat conditions, the specific needs of drone operators, and how frontline workflows evolve under pressure.
Throughout the full-scale invasion, they were in daily communication with drone pilots, field engineers, and adaptation units, receiving instant feedback on what was failing and what was urgently needed. This direct exposure made it clear that existing commercial and military solutions weren’t fit for real-world battlefield autonomy.
Nazar Bihun, CEO at NORDA Dynamics
‘The decision to build NORDA Dynamics wasn’t a business move — it was a mission to fill a life-critical gap with software that could adapt, survive, and deliver under extreme electronic warfare and frontline chaos,’ NORDA Dynamics’ CEO Nazar Bihun emphasizes.
The name NORDA is an acronym built from the first letters of the founders’ first names (Nazar Bihun, Oleksandr Liannoy – CTO, Dima Vovchuk – COO, and Anton Kharkhalis – Product Owner), symbolizing their personal commitment. Additionally, the letters in the name compose the Ukrainian words ‘народ’ (/na-ROD/, nation) and ‘дрон’ (/dron/, drone), highlighting the company’s commitment to national defense and UAV innovation.
Early Development, Frontline Testing, Strategic Partnerships, and Product Expansion
NORDA Dynamics began with field testing alongside volunteer drone units right after its formation in early 2023. By mid-2023, the company launched its first Underdog MVP, deploying it in active conflict zones.
‘From the moment we first thought our system was ready and sent our first samples to the frontline till it became really production ready, it took us eight months of non-stop bug fixing and improvements. There are so many different issues we identified on the frontline that one simply cannot reproduce in a lab,’ Mr Bihun shares.
Early 2024 marked a period of rapid growth, with major drone OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) such as DARTS and Shturm joining as partners. Later that year, NORDA released Stablelink, its breakthrough communication system designed for resilience in contested environments.
Underdog and Stablelink: Battlefield-Ready Autonomy
NORDA Dynamics’ flagship product, Underdog, is a last-mile targeting system designed for precision strikes in environments where traditional guidance fails due to electronic warfare or limited radio range. Using computer vision and AI, Underdog enables drones to autonomously complete the final approach after the pilot selects a target via onboard camera.
Complementing this is StableLink, NORDA’s advanced visual attitude hold system, which ensures stable altitude, azimuth, and coordinates. Essential for drone repeaters and bombers, StableLink allows for high-precision operations in contested, fast-changing combat zones, enhancing mission effectiveness and reliability even under extreme electronic and environmental interference.
Both Underdog and Stablelink are hardware-agnostic and compatible with most Betaflight, iNav, Pixhawk-based and Ardupilot-compatible systems. The stack runs efficiently on affordable companion computers like the Raspberry Pi zero2, making it ideal for Ukrainian-made drones. Compatibility with both high-end systems and low-cost FPV platforms is optimized, ensuring maximum accessibility for frontline units.
To train the AI models in these systems, NORDA Dynamics combines real-world combat telemetry, sensor recordings, and adversarial training datasets provided through field partnerships. The data comes from flight logs, simulated electronic warfare attacks, terrain mapping, and operator behavior patterns. There’s also assistance from partners with excellent data sets collection and model training.
Frontline user feedback represents a core pillar of NORDA Dynamics’ development. The startup integrates engineers directly into military support chats and frontline pilot communities. With daily feedback, bug reports, and feature requests from the field, and release software updates on a bi-weekly or even weekly basis in response, the feedback loop provides for NORDA Dynamics’ response speediness and battlefield relevance. Mr Bihun points out that this is made possible thanks to the team’s intensive volunteering background and the consequent credit of trust.
Real-World Impact
‘The most important aspect of NORDA Dynamics’ solution is last-mile targeting — specifically, automatic drone guidance. This is currently crucial on the front line, as it allows drones to hit targets more accurately, avoid electronic warfare jamming, and stay on course. While there are solutions on the market, very few have proven effective in real combat conditions. Therefore, what we really appreciate about NORDA Dynamics is that they have not only tested their products, but also used them in real life on the front line, and they have already shown their effectiveness,’ Angel One Fund’s managing partner Ivan Petrenko explains.
Ivan Petrenko, Managing Partner of Angel One Fund
‘Unlike many Western-developed autonomy stacks built in lab environments, NORDA’s systems have been stress-tested in war zones with real-world edge cases and jamming scenarios. We don’t just simulate contested environments—we build directly with feedback from operators in them, enabling rugged, lightweight software that performs in latency-heavy, signal-denied conditions. Our Stablelink technology uniquely enables fallback communication and coordination even with minimal infrastructure,’ Mr Bihun states.
According to NORDA Dynamics, the same autonomy stack is applicable for disaster response, search-and-rescue, fire spotting, and critical infrastructure monitoring. For example, route planning, ground station, together with the company’s partners’ visual navigation modules work well in GPS-denied urban rubble zones or under smoke coverage. Reportedly, discussions with civil actors interested in dual-use applications are already taking place.
‘Military purposes are much more difficult as you cannot rely on GPS at all, but in civil use cases GPS can help to reset the navigation inaccuracy,’ Mr Bihun comments.
Challenges and Solutions
As for the foreseeable future, NORDA Dynamics’ main challenges include Ukraine’s export control which complicates the sales to friendly NATO countries, standardization across varied drone hardware, maintaining software stability at scale while iterating fast, and the resistance of military units to new technologies.
The startup tackles these challenges by partnering with OEMs to pre-integrate NORDA Dynamics’ systems at factory level, hiring experienced QA and pilots for robust testing pipelines, building a modular installer to adapt the systems across diverse platforms, and cooperating with Ukraine’s key tech players and other partners to unblock international export of Ukrainian technologies.
International Growth and Other Plans
In 2025, the company initiated plans for international expansion and began developing the broader NORDA ecosystem. NORDA Dynamics’ recent injection of capital will be used to expand the startup’s engineering team, focusing on computer vision and embedded systems, support mass production partnerships with OEM drone manufacturers, and accelerate development of next-generation products such as Underdog Pro, Underdog AI, and mid-strike autonomy solutions. To support global growth, the company is also considering hiring an international sales team to scale overseas operations.
‘International expansion is our key focus, targeting NATO-aligned nations, particularly in Eastern Europe and North America. We are actively exploring the navigation of Ukrainian export control and dual-use technology regulations. This is the preliminary work that needs to be done to export our technology. Early engagement with defense integrators and ministries of defense is already underway. We’re building a legal framework for controlled exports and licensing and looking for international partners, connecting with them and demoing our technology,’ Mr Bihum tells ITKeyMedia.
‘We value NORDA team’s clear vision: their understanding of how to develop the product further and their partnerships with other startups with whom they complement each other,’ Mr Petrenko adds.
With their deep roots in frontline experience and mission-driven approach, NORDA Dynamics is rapidly emerging as Ukraine’s key innovator in autonomous UAV technology. Their battlefield-tested solutions offer critical capabilities in environments where conventional systems fall short. As the company scales globally, its commitment to agility, reliability, and real-world impact positions it at the forefront of not only next-generation drone warfare but dual-use innovation just as equally.
Kostiantyn is a freelance writer from Crimea but based in Lviv. He loves writing about IT and high tech because those topics are always upbeat and he’s an inherent optimist!
