Tethered drones might seem like an oxymoron but there’s a good reason to keep your drone connected to the ground. For example, Huless drones connect to a power source on the ground via a cable, allowing them to stay airborne indefinitely. The UAV platform acts as a signal relay, ensuring continuous connectivity for troops, ground vehicles, and command centres. The upcoming Highline-S model pushes this further, offering reconnaissance capabilities with endurance levels unheard of in typical drone systems.
“Our Highline UAV platform serves as a scalable solution that can integrate with existing battlefield networks,” said Semeniuk. “We are also working on Highline-S, a reconnaissance drone with unprecedented endurance, further enhancing battlefield situational awareness.”
Unlike consumer or military drones with limited battery life, tethered UAVs don’t have to land every 30 minutes. They create persistent battlefield networks, filling in the gaps where traditional radio signals are jammed or disrupted. In short, Huless can blanket the sky with network connectivity indefinitely.
Huless is obviously still a startup but they’re delivering battlefield-ready tech to the front. Further, they raised a total of $1.1 million, an impressive sum for a crowded market. This includes a $150,000 in grants from Brave1, Ukraine’s defense innovation initiative.
For a startup operating in an active war zone, these numbers signal something important: demand is real. Ukraine’s military needs better battlefield communication now, not five years from now.
Huless provides a simple but powerful solution: keep the signal in the air. Their tethered UAVs ensure troops, drones, and autonomous systems stay connected—even in the middle of a full-scale electronic warfare assault.
Semeniuk’s journey is straight out of a thriller. In 2022, while working as a dentist, he started thinking about remotely controlled pickup trucks—vehicles that could evacuate wounded soldiers or deliver supplies without risking human lives. The problem? Communication range. Controlling an unmanned vehicle over long distances required a stable, uninterrupted signal, something that didn’t exist on the battlefield.
That’s when he pivoted. The obvious solution was a drone-based signal relay, but standard drones had a fatal flaw: battery life. That led Semeniuk and his team to tethered UAVs, a proven technology abroad but nonexistent in Ukraine’s military landscape. Seeing the urgent need, they built their own.
Huless isn’t just building drones; it’s building a battlefield communication ecosystem. The company is expanding fast, with plans to scale to hundreds of units and build new products for next-gen ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) UAVs. They also want to move out of Ukraine and into NATO markets and build a UK-based R&D hub to maintain defense system compatibility.
Semeniuk knows every second counts when it comes to growth.
“We don’t have the luxury of time. The battlefield is evolving every day, and we have to be faster than the enemy,” he said.
For now, Huless is focused on winning the war at home. But as NATO allies watch Ukraine’s tech-driven battlefield transformation, expect startups like this to reshape military technology far beyond Eastern Europe. The future of war is being built in Ukraine, and Huless plays a big part.
-John Biggs, Resilience Media
