Huless

Huless is a Ukrainian defence-tech company, founded in 2023 and based in Khmelnytskyi, that builds tethered drones used as airborne communication relays. Its Highline-T stays connected to the ground by a cable that carries both power and data, so it can hold position for as long as four hours and keep working when satellite navigation is denied and the radio environment is jammed. Rather than carrying a warhead, the drone lifts a payload — typically a repeater — that extends the link between an operator and the strike drones working farther forward. The company puts the drone’s maximum working altitude at roughly 100 to 150 metres on a 170-metre cable, with a payload capacity of up to five kilograms and a data link running at up to 100 Mbps; the nine-kilogram aircraft holds station using optical stabilisation rather than GPS. It is sold as a full complex — an automated winch, a ground control station, a single-axis antenna mount, and a forward-looking camera — that the maker says deploys in about two and a half minutes.

Led by chief executive Taras Semeniuk, the firm has been testing its tether platform with third-party radio systems to broaden the kinds of communications it can relay. In early 2026 it ran a joint trial with Himera , lifting one of Himera’s airborne repeaters on the Highline-T and routing an infantry unit’s ATAK situational-awareness traffic through the resulting aerial node.

In early 2025 Huless said it had secured more than $1 million in private financing, a state-bank loan, and a grant from the Brave1 defence-tech cluster — angel backers it met at Brave1’s Defense Tech Valley summit — money it described as funding faster market entry and a doctrine for variable-altitude relay antennas. Tethered relays sit in the support layer of Ukraine’s drone war, alongside the GPS-denied autonomy work of firms such as NORDA Dynamics , addressing the same core problem of holding a usable link when the electromagnetic spectrum is contested.