The electronic warfare arms race behind Ukraine's drones — with Andriy Chulyk (Sine Engineering)

The comms backbone of Ukraine’s drone war.

“Ukraine will be a Silicon Valley for drones.”

Sine Engineering is powering the comms backbone of Ukraine’s drone war — keeping hundreds of thousands of drones flying when GPS is jammed and the enemy is hunting every signal.

The company went from 0 to 200 employees across Ukraine and Finland in 3 years, raised with the best US investors and is the leading provider of communications for drones in Ukraine.

Andriy Chulyk sat with me to discuss why electronic warfare (not firepower) is the real edge on the modern battlefield, how they’re scaling globally, and why they were just chosen as the first-ever investment of the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Fund.

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00:00 — From Standing Desks to Defense Tech

Louise Boucher: Hi, Andriy. I’m very happy to have you here. We met for the first time more than a year ago in Kyiv, and the progress you’ve made since then has been outstanding. Thanks a lot for taking the time.

Andriy Chulyk: It’s nice to be here, thank you. I’m glad to tell you more about our company and how we’re doing.

Louise Boucher: In February 2022 you were running a very different kind of business — a standing-desk company in Lviv. By April you’d founded a defense-tech company, Sine Engineering. You had no prior defense background, and you chose one of the hardest problems to solve: military communications in a contested environment. Fast-forward four years, and you’re a leading provider of communications solutions in Ukraine. How did that happen?

Andriy Chulyk: Everything we did connected to Ukraine and the war came out of necessity — the need to do at least something to make our military more effective on the battlefield. The full-scale invasion in 2022 was a huge shock for all of us here. So we simply tried to be helpful and to find some connection to the military. I had no relationship with them before, so I reached out through a Facebook page.

We started with fairly simple things, but over time we did a lot of work related to radio, to UAVs, and more. One of our very first projects wasn’t radio at all — it was electronic warfare. We helped create a really effective jammer against various Russian drones. But then we saw that a lot of companies in Ukraine had big problems with communications. Based on what we’d learned doing EW, we realized we could do something genuinely strong with comms. We started on that toward the end of 2022.

02:17 — Why Battlefield Comms Are So Hard

Louise Boucher: Let’s come back to the comms problem for the audience. What does it actually mean, and why is it hard? I think most people underestimate how important and how difficult it is.

Andriy Chulyk: There are three things that matter most for any UAV: reliable communications, positioning, and some level of autonomy. Comms and positioning have to work everywhere — that’s why they’re so critical for every team and every company trying to build their own flying vehicles. That’s why we focused on comms, and from comms we built our GPS-denied positioning.

Why is it so hard? In current warfare you’ll find a lot of electronic-warfare systems on both sides, so you have to provide good, reliable comms everywhere across the front line and in all conditions. That takes really high-level engineering. The same is true for positioning. You can get positioning on the battlefield today with very good CRPA antennas — arrays of 16 antennas or more — but they’re extremely expensive. So you have to find another way to get a position across the front line. Time-of-flight positioning, or positioning based on beacons, is one of the viable approaches.

04:06 — Is Electronic Warfare Actually New?

Louise Boucher: With Ukraine, the world has heard a lot about electronic warfare, GPS jamming, GPS-denied environments. But it makes me wonder — in previous conflicts, electronic warfare seemed like a smaller component. Is this something new that’s appeared with Ukraine and Russia?

Andriy Chulyk: No, it appeared long before — but the specifics were different. Before the full-scale invasion, everything was about big, expensive machines and platforms: Rafales, Eurofighters, F-22s, large drones. The comms on those were based on software-defined radio, and the systems were very expensive. But back then we weren’t talking about a million drones.

Now we’re talking about millions and millions of drones. It’s not cost-effective to put that same expensive equipment on a $300, $400, or $500 drone. So you have to use something more affordable that’s still fully operational on the front line. The whole approach to building these systems has to be completely different — and that’s exactly why we’ve had success with our product.

05:49 — Staying Ahead: Iteration in Hours

Louise Boucher: Russia isn’t just jamming — there’s spoofing of coordinates and positioning, frequencies shifting in real time, constant adaptation. How do you stay ahead of an adversary that’s also iterating every day?

Andriy Chulyk: First, on why we chose comms over EW: our team’s vision is that comms will win against EW. You can do a great deal with comms to defeat jammers, and that’s why we went this way.

As for staying ahead — it’s all about iteration. One of our main products has gone through around seven or eight hardware iterations, hundreds of firmware iterations, and I believe a few hundred software iterations on top of that. We iterate continuously. We have an integration team doing a lot of testing on the range, and we work directly with many military units who give us constant feedback. That helps us improve very fast — sometimes the iteration cycle is just a few hours. That speed helps us enormously.

07:24 — PASIKA and Mass Control

Louise Boucher: There’s also what comes next. You have PASIKA, a platform where one operator controls multiple drones, switching between them in real time. How close is that to being operationally real, and what changes when it’s mainstream on the battlefield?

Andriy Chulyk: We don’t call it swarming — we call it mass control. And it’s fully operational. You can use it with different models everywhere across the front line. It’s not a thing of the future; it already exists, and it can be installed on almost any platform — fixed-wing, multicopter, and others.

The idea came from a simple problem: we have a lot of UAV pilots, but each one usually controls a single drone, and that’s very hard to scale. So you need a different approach that lets you control many drones simultaneously. PASIKA is a great example of how that technology can deliver mass-control capability. But we don’t force customers to use only our PASIKA software — we provide the technology and an SDK, and they can build their own. For example, we have an integration with Mosaic from Quantum Systems. It’s an open platform, so it integrates easily with other systems.

09:22 — Finding the Talent

Louise Boucher: Coming back to talent density — building comms is hard, and very few people actually know how to do it. Where did you find your talent? Did you bring in people from the industry, or bring in outsiders and upskill them?

Andriy Chulyk: You’re right, it’s really hard to find the talent to build this. And finding talent is one thing — having a clear vision of exactly what to build and how it should be done is another. That’s why we look for talent in Ukraine, Finland, Sweden, and maybe Germany soon. We’re a global company now, trying to hire talent everywhere. But beyond talent, the crucial thing is understanding precisely what to implement in your product and how.

10:26 — Going Global

Louise Boucher: On the global part — you built all of this from Ukraine, with the war happening around you, and now you’re expanding. You’ve opened an office in Finland, you have a US holding entity, you’re selling to many countries. What did going global actually require in how you think and operate? Did you plan it from the start, or did it happen gradually?

Andriy Chulyk: If you’d asked me a few years ago whether we’d open an office in Finland, I’d have said never. But now we have one, with a lot of people doing great work there. So we’re open to anything. We’re thinking about opening a big R&D center in the US as well. We’re also expanding beyond comms into computer vision and AI. We just try to follow our customers and give them everything they need to build their best platforms and systems.

11:42 — Why Finland, and How They Choose

Louise Boucher: Was it more opportunistic — in Finland, for instance, there’s the Nokia heritage, so I imagine a deep pool of comms talent. How did it happen? Was it a customer pulling you in? How do you decide which country to expand into?

Andriy Chulyk: It started at a small conference in Tampere, maybe a year and a half ago. We visited the city, we liked it, we had conversations with a few people — and afterward we decided we should definitely do something there.

12:17 — Raising From US Investors

Louise Boucher: The global dimension is also in your cap table — you raised from major US investors. I think you were one of the first Ukrainian companies to attract that kind of quality foreign capital. How did that go? Were they open to Ukrainian defense? Did you have to educate them?

Andriy Chulyk: It’s genuinely hard for US investors to invest in Ukraine. They know exactly what to do with US teams, but not with Ukrainians. So it’s still quite unique — but it’s changing, and I believe it will soon be much easier for them to invest in Ukrainian companies, or at least companies with Ukrainian roots.

Louise Boucher: It feels like an ecosystem kickstarting — even if it’s new, each company can vouch for the next, and it builds from there.

Andriy Chulyk: There are more and more companies doing similar things.

Louise Boucher: Do you know what worked for you specifically, given you were one of the first? Was it the US entity? The talent you’d built outside Ukraine? How did you bring those investors on board compared with other Ukrainian companies?

Andriy Chulyk: It’s a combination of a lot of things. We’re more about the underlying technologies than the final products like UAVs — that’s one thing. We were also profitable and self-funded, with strong traction. And we were very intensive with our prospective investors, so we ended up oversubscribed. But it all depends — every company’s situation is unique. If someone asked me how to build something similar, I couldn’t give a single answer, because everything is unique.

14:19 — Keeping the Bootstrapped Mindset

Louise Boucher: As you said, you were bootstrapped early and became profitable quickly. Now, with this fundraising, you have plenty of cash. Do you still keep some principles from your bootstrapped days? Does that teach you something different?

Andriy Chulyk: I’d say we’re still essentially bootstrapped — we’ve just spent the investment on international growth. The point of the seed round was really to show that we’re an investable company. That was the idea.

14:56 — The First US–Ukraine Reconstruction Fund Investment

Louise Boucher: Recently you had big news: you were selected as the first investment from the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Fund — the fund born out of the minerals deal with the US — beating out more than 200 applicants. What did it feel like to become, in some ways, the symbol of a new political partnership?

Andriy Chulyk: I wouldn’t frame it as beating 200 companies. I think Sine was the best choice for both governments because we met all the requirements and we were very open throughout the due-diligence process. We also have great US partners who helped us a lot with the negotiations — with the DFC, and with the Ukrainian government. It was a unique process, but beneficial for all parties.

Louise Boucher: What does the partnership actually look like — both for Sine as a company and more broadly, in terms of this US–Ukraine agreement?

Andriy Chulyk: I’m sure it’s a big win for Sine to be the first, and to have both governments as partners. I’m also sure it will be very helpful in the future, because when an investor like that puts money into you, everyone knows you’ve passed serious due diligence — there’s nothing unclear about your company. That’s why we decided to go with URIF.

Louise Boucher: It sends a strong quality signal. More broadly, what is the US–Ukraine Reconstruction Fund about? What’s the goal for both countries?

Andriy Chulyk: It’s a private fund backed by two governments. Overall it’s a private fund, but with some features you don’t usually see in private funds — extra requirements and a few other things. But fundamentally it’s just another fund operating for profit.

17:43 — The Future of Ukrainian Defense Tech

Louise Boucher: Let’s zoom out, because this episode — and Sine’s success — is also about the future of Ukrainian defense tech. Ukraine now has hundreds of defense-tech companies, battlefield testing, 24-hour feedback loops, and a generation of engineers stress-tested like no one else. The million-dollar question: what happens to this ecosystem when the war ends?

Andriy Chulyk: I think it’ll be similar to Israel after its conflicts. All the big companies will have a presence here. It’ll be a huge win for the industry overall, because the best of what exists today for UAVs, you’ll find in Ukraine. I believe it’ll become a major part of Ukraine’s economy — a kind of Silicon Valley for drone companies.

18:39 — Where Sine Goes Next

Louise Boucher: And you’re right at the center of it — building communications for drones, UGVs, interceptors. Drones now account for around 80% of casualties. What does that tell you about Sine’s future? Where do you see the company in five or ten years?

Andriy Chulyk: We definitely want to stay at the frontier of the technologies tied to the commercial and dual-use markets, and to go deeper. For example, we’re now working on custom-silicon projects, so we can create alternatives to systems like DJI’s. There’s a lot of different work ahead.

Louise Boucher: So you see yourself keeping the global headquarters in Ukraine, with teams and customers everywhere in the world?

Andriy Chulyk: Yes, definitely.