Molfar

Molfar is a Ukrainian open-source intelligence firm founded in 2019 by Artem Starosiek, with its operational base in Dnipro and a register of clients that has come to include the country’s security service, military intelligence, and defence ministry. It grew out of competitive-intelligence and corporate due-diligence work, then pivoted hard after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 toward military intelligence: mapping enemy logistics networks, assessing the effectiveness of drone strikes, and assembling target packages from material that Russian soldiers post about themselves. In June 2026 it became a named data supplier to the autonomous-drone company Swarmer , feeding verified battlefield observations into the training of swarm AI.

The firm’s method is open-source material run through disciplined verification. Analysts pull from Telegram, social media, and satellite imagery, then push each lead through multi-source confirmation, temporal and geospatial correlation, and equipment identification before it is treated as actionable. In one documented case, analysts located a Russian brigade from an anniversary video its members posted to Telegram and fixed the buildings it occupied within hours; in another, they named dozens of airmen they linked to the January 2023 strike on a Dnipro apartment block that killed 45 people.

Molfar’s relevance to autonomous warfare is twofold. Its commercial arm sells deepfake- and AI-fraud risk assessment, working the defensive side of synthetic media. More consequentially, the Swarmer partnership casts the firm as a pipeline of human-verified, geolocated combat data — the kind of attributed, real-world observation that Swarmer’s chief executive has argued no synthetic dataset can replicate. Molfar runs roughly three dozen analysts alongside a much larger pool of volunteers, and maintains public registers of individuals it ties to alleged war crimes.