How this Ukrainian walkie-talkie maker caught the attention of the US military
It was founded after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Its products are being tested by the US Air Force.
The Ukrainian defense tech industry has boomed in recent years.
From drone and robotics makers to electronic warfare system providers, Ukrainian innovation has been on full display since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.
One company to have sprung up since the conflict began is Himera, which makes electronic warfare-resistant walkie-talkies.
Its products include the G1 Pro — a tactical handheld radio — and the B1 repeater, which extends communication ranges.
Despite only having launched in 2022, the company has quickly caught the attention of the defense tech industry, as well as the US military.
The product's major selling point is that it offers a potential solution to one of the defining challenges of the war in Ukraine — electronic warfare.
The G1 is EW-resistant, using frequency-hopping technology to help evade electronic warfare interference, which seeks to disrupt and jam certain signals like GPS, radio, and video.
Reticulate Micro, which supplies Himera's radios in the US, announced the first US delivery of G1 Pro radios to the US Air Force in October 2024.
The company said the Air Force would test the G1 Pro alongside Reticulate's Video Assured Secure Transmission (VAST) technology, which delivers real-time video streaming.
In a press release at the time, Joshua Cryer, then the president and CEO of Reticulate Micro, said: "By combining the Himera G1 Pro with VAST, we're aiming to democratize secure video transmission on the battlefield—empowering every warfighter with video-capable radio technology for enhanced situational awareness."
Misha Rudominski, one of Himera's cofounders, told Business Insider that Himera's tech "bridges the gap" between tactical and commercial communications solutions.
"We take the best from both worlds," he said. "We provide all the tactical relevant functionality like low probability of detection, low probability of interception, and low probability of jamming, which you don't find in commercial spec solutions."
"But we do it in a very user-friendly way," he continued. "We want the lightest radio, we have one of the longest battery lives on the market."
The G1 Pro has a battery life of around 48 hours and weighs just 300 grams. It can support the transmission of multiple information types, such as GPS, voice data, and texts, and is programmable by an encrypted app on a mobile or tablet device.
"We make a very scalable and affordable solution," Rudominski added. "The scalability is a big point because we only use commercial off-the-shelf components."
Representatives for Himera told Ukrainian news outlet Militarnyi in March that the company was "producing up to 1,000 radios per month" and that it had the capacity to "scale quickly to 2,500 units."
"For large-scale orders, we are prepared to supply 10,000 to 15,000 radios per month," they said.
Innovation has been crucial to Kyiv's fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces, and Ukrainian firms have continually adapted to meet the battlefield's ever-evolving demands.
Rudominski told BI that this had also been key to Himera's success.
"Over the last three years, we've done more than 80 versions of firmware updates," he said. "We've done more than probably 20 versions of separate kinds of hardware products. Most of them didn't go into production, but most of them have at some capacity been tested on the battlefield."
Along with Reticulate, Himera has also partnered with Quantropi, a Canadian quantum security company, to integrate its security solutions into Himera's products.
"We have our own software, but they can enhance our capacity," Rudominski said.
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