Zvook

Zvook (“sound” in Ukrainian) is a Lviv-based startup, founded in 2023, that builds an acoustic detection network for air defence. Each sensor pairs an acoustic mirror — a parabolic antenna that focuses faint sound onto a microphone — with a small on-board computer running machine-learning software, and listens for the distinctive signatures of aerial threats, sorting them into categories such as Shahed-type drones, cruise missiles, helicopters and jets. The sensors are passive and decentralised: because they emit nothing, they can sit at points where radar would be too exposed to operate, and by comparing the same sound across several units the network estimates a target’s type, bearing and speed. The company says around 40 of its complexes are operating across Ukraine, concentrated near the eastern border where drones and missiles cross in daily.

The project grew out of a wartime volunteer effort started by Pavlo Tsiupka, head of the smart-home firm i3 Engineering, reservist Maryan Sulym, and Dmytro Believtsov, a co-founder of the voice-cloning company Respeecher ; engineers from Respeecher and the data-annotation firm Label Your Data have contributed to training the model. The team has described how early tests were no better than a coin toss before the model was refined on a large library of background and threat sounds. Classified target data is passed to the Delta situational-awareness system, the reporting says, within seconds of a detection, to cue mobile fire teams.

In January 2026 Zvook launched a second product, the NW0 — an Ethernet-connected tactical acoustic sensor aimed at short-range FPV-drone detection, with 360-degree coverage between 150 and 450 metres, an IP67 weatherproof rating and AI that monitors the acoustic environment. The company says it can hear fibre-optic FPVs, which carry no radio link and so slip past jamming and signal-based detection. Acoustic sensing cannot intercept anything itself, but it can cue other systems at a fraction of the cost of radar — the trait that has drawn reported NATO interest. The ranges, sensor counts and accuracy figures cited here are drawn from reporting and the company’s own statements.