MILAN — The US defense company Auterion has signed onto a new partnership with Ukraine-based drone manufacturer Skyfall to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with 50,000 FPV drones equipped with autonomy software to strike moving targets, the American company announced today.
The total drone order is more than double Auterion’s prior deployments to Ukraine, which totalled approximately 40,000 units, a company representative told Breaking Defense. The purchase involves Skyfall’s Shrike first-person-view drones, already used in combat across the war-torn country, fitted with Auterion’s Skynode S, which relies on artificial intelligence and computer vision to fly drones through electronically jammed environments.
Auterion said the contract, to be jointly executed by it and Skyfall, was awarded by an undisclosed European NATO nation. Auterion, for its part, would receive $100 million in revenue from the deployment.
Reuters reported on Sunday, citing an unnamed source, that Germany was the undisclosed European funding nation behind the order.
Auterion has a major European office in Munich, and while the US company is not allowed on the specific country funding the purchase, a company representative told Breaking Defense that the Munich-based team is delivering the order. The German Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment at press time.
As part of a future software update, the Skynode S will give FPV drones swarming capabilities, according to a company press release. Deliveries of the systems have already begun this week and will conclude “in the coming months.”
Skyfall said that the Shrike has destroyed a wide range of Russian military assets, with hits on targets including an Mi-8 helicopter, armored vehicles, electronic warfare and artillery systems, and a TOS-1A SoIntsepyok heavy flamethrower.
A significant cost asymmetry has emerged throughout the Ukraine war, accelerated by the use of low-cost FPVs that have crippled multi-million-dollar military assets that would otherwise have required expensive missiles or equipment to engage.
Last month, Serhii Sternenko, a drone warfare advisor to the Ukrainian Minister of Defence, published on X that a Ukraine-made FPV quadcopter successfully hit a target at a range of 102 kilometers (63.4 miles) without using a mothership. This would represent a major breakthrough in extending the distances FPVs can reach, where the initial operational standard for these platforms was much lower, around five to 15 kilometers at the start of the conflict.
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