Occam raises €3m to bring autonomous drones to Ukraine’s frontline

Occam’s journey started with a prototype in a London park where Guiam Wainwright walked his big, white, furry samoyed. Except at the end of the lead in his hand wasn’t his dog walking, but a drone flying in the sky.

Guiam Wainwright was testing an early version of what is now a fully autonomous drone defence system. Back then, each time the drone’s primitive AI spotted a trigger — a passing dog walker, for instance — it would lock on, try to chase after it and be reeled back in. Within months, versions of this system would be assessed for use on the Ukrainian frontline.

All of this testing was happening before Wainwright had legally incorporated Occam as a company, or even settled on its original name. The startup was first called Cakeshop AI, a title he later abandoned after discovering it provoked a Marmite-like reaction among army generals on the frontline — and didn’t quite sit alongside other military-grade tools.

In addition to working to the deadline of a war, Wainwright, now co-founder and CEO of Occam, had his own smaller, self-imposed version — or, as he jokes, one imposed by his wife — in the form of his newborn daughter.

The idea for the startup emerged around ten months ago, when Wainwright was about 30 days into paternity leave. “I got a bit bored,” he says. Conversations with his wife’s cousin — a former Director General of MI6 — soon turned to Ukraine, and specifically to drone commanders operating on the frontline.

What began as a way to fill time while helping a good cause quickly evolved into a full-scale effort to automate cheap drone warfare, tackling what Wainwright describes as the pilot-to-drone mapping problem.

By that point, drones had already become the defining weapon of the conflict. Ukrainian forces were increasingly reliant on them to compensate for shortages in manpower and conventional firepower — but the systems available to them did not scale.

“The problem the Ukrainians laid out was essentially that the drone program was keeping them in the fight. But the drone program had limitations due to the technology they had available to them,” Wainwright says. “The reality of it is you need to put mass in the air to have a wall. If you can only put a couple of drones up in the air, you’ve got a mesh. It's not like an impenetrable barrier that can hold anyone back.”

Integration testing

The scale of the challenge is stark. Last year, approximately 54,700 drone attacks were recorded in Ukraine, compared with about 11,000 in 2024. Drones accounted for roughly 96% of all aerial weapons deployed — up from around 30% at the start of the air war in 2022.

That context has shaped Occam’s rapid trajectory. The company’s system has now completed assessment as fit for integration testing by Brave1, the Ukrainian defence tech cluster.

“AI is one of our key priorities, as it is fundamentally transforming the nature of combat operations,”  says Andrii Hrytseniuk, CEO at Brave1. “We highly value the fact that British technology companies like Occam are working directly with Ukraine to respond to real frontline needs — an experience that strengthens not only Ukraine, but Europe as a whole.”

Alongside this validation, Occam has raised a €3 million (£2.6m) pre-seed round led by Presto Tech Horizons, a resilience-focused VC fund backed by defence-industrial partner CSG (Czechoslovak Group), with participation from Antler, Freedom Fund, TYR.vc and a group of experienced defence and security industry angels.

What began as a paternity-leave side project has rapidly become something far bigger.

Day one at Antler

Wainwright co-founded Occam alongside COO Daniil Bash, whom he met on day one of Antler. Wainwright arrived with a single black slide bearing white text: ‘War is here’. It followed a stream of more familiar fintech and crypto pitches, making it a somewhat polarising introduction. Bash was wearing a t-shirt reading ‘slava Ukraine’ and stood up and applauded Wainwright’s pitch.

“For the rest of the cohort, I was the crazy guy trying to kill people with AI.”

CTO Aniketh Ramesh joined after meeting Wainwright at a defence hackathon. Wainwright himself brings a background spanning startups and machine learning, starting off his career supporting NATO troops with AI and ML, founding multiple startups and helping lead AI and robotics at Ocado.

Now, working in Ukraine, “it is simultaneously amazing and awful to see such a large number of people come together to collectively defend each other,” he says.

Until now, there had never been a real need for this kind of technology. Military systems were typically cloud-based and required access to high levels of compute and expensive hardware. Ukraine has forced a shift: operations must run at mass, cheaply and autonomously.

An automated frontline

With drones now inflicting around 90% of battlefield damage, an automated frontline increasingly means automated drones. Occam’s approach involves installing its software onto existing Ukrainian drones, paired with a low-cost compute unit that operates autonomously — without relying on the cloud or GPS.

Previously, one pilot would operate one drone and would have to be within a roughly 20-mile radius and there were high failure rates caused by GPS spoofing and signal jamming. Occam’s answer is autonomy on minimal hardware.

The company has engineered a sequence of algorithms capable of running on a Raspberry Pi Zero — an ultra-compact computer smaller than a credit card and costing just £10–15. The board is mounted on the drone, connected to the camera and flight controller, and given a mission: where to go and what to target. From there, it operates independently.

Safety measures are built in, including battery constraints to prevent drones leaving designated areas, alongside direct Ukrainian military oversight. Occam is now at the integration stage, with Brave1 pursuing collaboration between the startup and select Ukrainian manufacturers to bring the technology to market.

The team itself is spread across integration engineers — many ex-infantry — in Ukraine, and core technologists based in Tallinn and London.

“We're going to have to win this based on tech and economies, and so if we invest in automation, if we can create battlefield systems where the brunt of all the fighting is held by automated systems, we can send robots to die,” Wainwright says. “And that means that our casualty count drops really low.”

Occam is now scaling its Ukrainian operations, with the ambition to be deployed across every drone in the fleet this year, continually adapting to Russian tactics. The company is also running a small number of paid adoption projects with European defence primes — which Wainwright cannot yet name — that will “fly by the end of the year”. A second raise is planned for the end of the year to support further expansion.

Matej Luhovy, Partner at Presto Tech Horizons, says: “They deploy, learn, and iterate under conditions dictated by the front line. Gui has an exceptional ability to rally people around a clear mission, and the team executes on it with urgency and discipline. Combined with a software-only autonomy stack that works without GPS or external connectivity, this is a solution that is not just novel, but fundamentally different.”

Beyond Ukraine, Occam has strategic partnerships and collaborations already underway with European defence primes seeking to reinforce NATO capabilities.

“This war will not be won not by the weight of numbers but by the power of creativity and innovation. Trusting good people to come up with good ideas, and creating good systems to apply them,” says Sir Alex Younger, former Director General of MI6 and Occam advisor. “Occam is a great example. It will confer asymmetric advantage in a fight that we simply must win.”