What began in mid-2023 as a small volunteer circle of drone enthusiasts has quickly turned into one of Ukraine’s fastest-growing defense tech companies – building fiber-optic strike drones, battlefield sensors, and now preparing for entry into missile and air-defense systems. BlueBird Tech co-founder Valerii Zarubin says the early days had nothing to do with business plans or funding rounds. It started with curiosity and necessity.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Valerii Zarubin, CEO of BlueBird Tech company. “There was no brand at all,” he recalls. “We just studied FPV [first-person view] drones from scratch – what they are made of, how they fly, how the systems actually work.” By January 2024, that informal group had become a registered company. From hobby parts to industrial scale At first, the work looked almost improvised – assembling drones from components ordered online and testing them in the field. But very quickly, the scale changed. “The real challenge was not building one drone,” Zarubin says. “It was understanding how to build thousands.” By late 2023, the team had stabilized a working design and began preparing for serial production. That shift forced a new reality: funding, procurement chains, suppliers, logistics, and long waiting lists for components – especially from China, where global demand for drone parts was already overheating.