In February 2022, Yaroslav Azhnyuk was running Petcube — a San Francisco-backed Y Combinator company that made smart pet cameras selling in Best Buy. Three years later, he leads The Fourth Law, an AI startup building fully autonomous drone systems for Ukraine’s defence. He was awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit by President Zelenskyy for his role in co-founding Brave1, Ukraine’s defence-tech accelerator, and for launching Spend with Ukraine. Resilience Media spoke with him in January 2025.

When we first met in Kyiv around 2013, you were founding Petcube. Then you moved to San Francisco. What were your plans before the invasion?

Yes, then I moved to San Francisco in 2014 for five years. Petcube got accepted into Y Combinator in 2016, so it wasn’t the reason we moved to the US — we moved there because that’s where our customers were. We were actually the first Ukrainian company to get accepted to YC. I came back to Kyiv in 2019. At that point I was CEO at Petcube, and there was also a lot of work with two other businesses — Fuel Finance and Ozero, which were also growing. Then the full-scale invasion started, and it changed everything.

How quickly did the tech community in Ukraine organise a response?

Very quickly. Early 2022, myself and a bunch of friends united to reach out to different US Senators and members of Congress to lobby for more weapons to Ukraine — which we like to think may have helped influence the 2022 Lend-Lease Act in some tiny way. I also started working on a hub to coordinate Ukrainian tech innovators in defence with investors, the government, and the army. I discovered there were a couple of other groups working on something similar, and in late 2022 all of that merged into what is now known as Brave1. Brave1 is a governmental body, but it operates like a flexible association — very modern and nimble. And in 2022 I was also part of the group that helped start D3, a fund investing in defence in Ukraine.

When did you decide to start The Fourth Law?

In late 2023, I reached the conclusion that the best value I can bring is to solve individual autonomy for drones. So I started The Fourth Law. At the same time, I was arguing with my Petcube partners that we have all this experience producing over a million cameras, doing mass manufacturing, procurement, and international logistics — and that is exactly what Ukraine needs to manufacture FPV drones at scale. That is how Odd Systems came about, which manufactures FPV drones and thermal cameras. I am a core founder and investor there, but I am not running it day to day. This Fall we launched our first thermal camera — more feature-rich than Chinese cameras in the category, but also less expensive. It is quite a feat to beat the Chinese both on price and quality right out of the door.

“Inexpensive individual drone autonomy is the single most important defence technology of this decade. Nothing close to that will be done this decade.”

Why is autonomy specifically so important? There are already millions of FPV drones in the field.

Now I feel it is even more important. Let me explain the FPV drone phenomenon first, because it is still under-appreciated even in Ukraine, and many times more so outside. FPV drones are one of those technologies that comes maybe once a decade and grows incredibly fast because it is orders of magnitude better at what it does compared to competition. In January 2023, there were probably about 1,000 of these FPV drones made per month in Ukraine. Within a year, that grew by a factor of 100. By early 2024, there were 100,000-plus FPV drones produced every month in Ukraine. FPV drones were causing up to 80 percent of casualties and losses across the front line. That was when Ukraine was starved of artillery shells. Artillery used to be the god of war for centuries. Suddenly, within one year, it was overtaken by a $500 drone.

And now the production numbers are even higher?

Ukraine alone produced over two million FPV drones in 2024. Think about that. Ukraine, with its tiny economy. Tesla will produce less than two million cars in 2024. The US produced less than one million artillery shells. Ukraine alone, at war, produced two million FPV drones. These drones have effectively become the biggest robotics platform on the planet. And they can take out infantry, vehicles, armoured vehicles; they can do mining and demining; goods delivery; radio repeaters. One thing replacing ten other things, at a fraction of the cost of each. That is the iPhone moment for defence technology.

“These are not just weapons. This is the biggest robotics platform on the planet.”

So where does autonomy fit into all this?

Right now there are fewer than 10,000 pilots in Ukraine who can operate a drone. If you do not need a pilot, you can get to a million operators — because that is how many people know how to operate an AK-47. That is two orders of magnitude improvement in the available workforce. Then the current precision of an FPV drone is about 10 percent. With autonomy you can get that to 50 to 90 percent easily. That is another half order of magnitude. The combination of these factors means autonomy increases the utility of one FPV drone by roughly 10,000 times. When I say 10,000 times, I am not being rhetorical. I calculated it.

You describe it as “Uber for munition delivery.”

Yes. The vision is: you choose on your mobile app where you are along with your drone, you choose where the adversary is, you ask the drones to go there, they find the target autonomously, the mission is executed, they return, land, you can recharge them, get the video of the mission accomplished, and send them back. You do not need a skilled pilot for each drone. You just need someone who can tap a screen. That changes the economics of conflict entirely.

What is the message to the West in all of this?

If you want to keep peace, you have to be armed and prepared. The West is, in many ways, still asleep. The US and Europe are not investing in defence technology at the pace Ukraine and its adversaries are forcing on the world. Ukraine has become the fastest-moving defence-tech lab on the planet, not by choice, but by necessity. What is being learned here will define the next generation of conflict. Ignoring it is a strategic error.