Farsight Vision, Clarity and Dwarf Engineering named winners of Battle Proven defence startup competition

At the Defence Tech Valley summit, held in Lviv on 16–17 September, the Brave1 cluster hosted the final stage of the Battle Proven defence startup competition. Six prizes of $10,000 each were shared among four Ukrainian startups, with Farsight Vision and Clarity emerging as the standout winners after securing top spots in their categories, along with additional sponsor bonuses.

Applications for the competition closed on 25 July, with 30 teams selected to participate in Defence Tech Valley. Ten finalists made it to the main stage, including Farsight Vision, Buntar Aerospace, RoverTech, BlueBird Tech, DevDroid, Ratel, Strix Air, WIY Drones, HIMERA, and the summit’s headline-maker, Swarmer.

The startups competed across three categories:

• Trail Blazers – new teams with revolutionary concepts
• Gamechangers – products already tested in combat
• Power Players – mature teams shaping the daily course of the war

In the Power Players category, victory went to Farsight Vision, a Ukrainian-Estonian project developing software and hardware for reconnaissance and situational awareness through geospatial analysis and 3D terrain modelling from UAV data.

According to CEO Viktoriia Yaremchuk, Farsight Vision already works with more than 200 Defence Forces units, from platoon to brigade level. “We’ve built a unique dataset to train neural networks for change detection along the line of contact, provide software for operating UGVs in 3D, and implemented a 3D-tiling technology in our FSV App that allows visualisation and interaction with infinitely large 3D spaces,” she explained.

The Trail Blazers category and its $10,000 prize, sponsored by NUNC Capital, went to Clarity – a software product that uses artificial intelligence to detect enemy forces and equipment in photos and videos. The tool accelerates the kill chain, cuts analysts’ time by up to 90%, and can run on a standard laptop. In addition to its category win, Clarity received another $10,000 from the Defence Builder accelerator.

Among the Gamechangers, Dwarf Engineering took the prize, awarded by Quantum Systems, with $10,000. The final bonus prize went to BlueBird Tech, a developer of innovative electronic warfare systems, which received $10,000 from Tekever.