Ukrainian-founded UFORCE to build uncrewed boats in Britain, backed by £113 million from UK wealth fund

UFORCE, a Ukrainian-founded defense technology company headquartered in Britain, is to expand its engineering, training and production in the UK and build uncrewed boats there with a British supply chain, according to a release from the Ministry of Defence, the National Wealth Fund and HM Treasury published on November 12. The government says more than 70% of the content of each UK-built boat will come from British suppliers. Backing the expansion, the government-backed National Wealth Fund is investing £113 million as part of the company's $700 million Series A round, which the government put at over £525 million. By our arithmetic, the fund's share is about a fifth of the round at the government's sterling figure.

UFORCE develops autonomous and uncrewed systems across sea, land and air that the government describes as “combat-proven.” The release centers on boats, with hulls, engines, electronics and fit-out for the UK-built vessels to be sourced in the UK.

What the money is meant to build

According to the government, the expansion will create hundreds of high-skilled jobs in engineering, software, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. Britain is to be a major base for the company's software, command-and-control and production work as it grows abroad, the release says, and a place from which to support allies such as the Joint Expeditionary Force nations, with particular attention to operations in northern seas. The company will also develop and sponsor apprenticeships with universities and colleges.

The release leaves several things out. It does not name the round's other investors, give a valuation, say where in the UK production will take place, or put a number on the jobs beyond “hundreds.”

A demonstration from Norway

The government said Defence Secretary Wes Streeting tested the technology from HMS Prince of Wales in Norway, remotely piloting a UFORCE MV7 uncrewed vessel, which it describes as part of the Magura family, located more than 1,500 miles away in the Atlantic near Portugal. The ship hosted the Atlantic Future Forum in Oslo on November 11 and 12, where, according to a co-hosts' statement, participants from 30 countries backed helping start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises turn new technology into defense capability faster.

In just a few years the UK has gone from training Ukraine to being trained by Ukraine

UFORCE chief executive Oleg Rogynskyy said in the same release that the investment lets the company make “sovereign, combat-proven, cost-effective autonomous systems available to the UK and its allies.”

Part of a wider push

The investment follows other recent UK government moves on defense technology and industry. On September 25, the Ministry of Defence invited UK companies to propose how they would use imagery and video from Ukraine's Avengers AI Labs database to build AI models for battlefield drones, including swarms, in the first competition under the UK-Ukraine AI Partnership; up to 12 companies can get the data. On October 30, the Ministry of Defence and HM Treasury announced an offsets policy, applying to a select number of procurements from April 2027, under which overseas firms' UK defense contracts worth £50 million or more will be considered for requirements to deliver benefits to the UK, such as jobs and investment, that could reach the contract's value. That release also noted the Chancellor's confirmation that the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank would deploy up to £5 billion over four years into defense, dual-use and other national-security sectors. The government calls the UFORCE investment an example of the UK-Ukraine 100 Year Partnership.