Swift Beat

Swift Beat is the US drone company at the centre of Eric Schmidt ’s “Project Eagle” — the former Google chief executive’s effort to supply Ukraine with low-cost, AI-enabled attack and interceptor drones. The venture has changed names more than once: it surfaced publicly in 2024 as White Stork, a secretive maker of cheap military drones, was reported under the codename Project Eagle after Forbes wrote about it, and now trades as Swift Beat, LLC. Several outlets also tie the same effort to a sister firm, Perennial Autonomy, credited with the company’s Merops interceptor and its Hornet strike drone. The company is owned through Volya Robotics OÜ, an entity registered in Tallinn, Estonia, whose sole beneficiary is Schmidt. He had earlier chaired the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and the NSCAI , the federal AI commission that pressed Washington to move faster on military AI.

The company’s pitch is autonomy at a low unit cost. Its drones are designed to use onboard computer vision for navigation and targeting so they can keep working in the heavily jammed, GPS-denied conditions of the Ukrainian front, where electronic warfare routinely severs the link between a drone and its operator. Reported product lines span interceptors meant to knock down Russian Shahed-type attack drones, reconnaissance and fire-control quadcopters, and mid-range strike drones, with future work aimed at intercepting cruise and ballistic missiles and at automated turrets.

In 2025 the effort moved from secrecy to formal partnership. At a meeting in Denmark, with President Volodymyr Zelensky present, Ukraine’s then-defence minister Rustem Umerov and Schmidt signed a memorandum of long-term strategic cooperation. Under the deal Swift Beat committed to producing hundreds of thousands of drones during 2025, with output rising in 2026, and to giving Ukraine priority access at cost price. It places Schmidt — one of the most prominent voices in American debates over AI and defence — directly inside the supply chain of Europe’s largest war, alongside other Western-linked suppliers such as Neros and Fire Point .

The clearest product of that partnership in the field is the Hornet, a roughly $6,000 fixed-wing strike drone that Ukrainian units have used through 2025 and 2026 to attack Russian trucks, fuel tankers and supply convoys deep behind the front. Its onboard target recognition lets it pick out and dive on a vehicle even when the link to the operator is jammed, and its near-silent electric propulsion and visual navigation have made it hard for Russian forces to hear, detect or jam — the cumulative-effect campaign Ukrainian crews call “road-cutting.”