Oleksandr Stepura: Lessons From Scaling a Hardware Startup From Ukraine to Europe

Hardware startups are often called the hard mode of entrepreneurship. Products take years to develop, every prototype costs real money, and customers expect reliability from day one. The story of Oleksandr Stepura, founder of the unmanned aircraft company Skyeton, shows what it takes to build a complex engineering business from Ukraine and then scale it across borders.

Skyeton develops Raybird, a fixed-wing unmanned aerial system designed for long-endurance monitoring missions. But the company’s path offers lessons that go well beyond drones: choosing the right first customers, deciding what exactly to sell, and knowing when to move production closer to the market.

Starting with the hardest customers

Many founders begin with consumers or small businesses because sales cycles are short. Stepura took the opposite route. Skyeton’s early customers were government agencies such as police, border services and coast guards: organisations with demanding requirements, long procurement processes and little tolerance for failure.

That choice was difficult, but it forced the team to reach a high technical standard early. Building for agencies that need to watch large areas for many hours meant the product had to work in real conditions, not only in demos. The resulting engineering discipline later became one of the company’s main competitive advantages.

Learning to compete with global players

Skyeton’s growth attracted the attention of IMD, the Swiss business school, which published a case study on the company. The case examines how a startup from Eastern Europe used a local pool of aeronautical engineering talent to reach technical parity with far larger international manufacturers, and the strategic choices that followed.

For founders, the takeaway is clear: talent concentration can be a strategic asset. Ukraine has a deep tradition in aviation engineering, and Stepura built the company around that expertise rather than trying to compete on capital alone.

Product or service: a founder’s dilemma

One of the central questions in Skyeton’s development was what exactly the company should sell. A drone can be sold as a standalone airframe, as a complete system with ground control and sensors, or as a service in which the customer simply pays for data and flight hours.

Each model changes the business. Selling airframes is simpler but commoditises the product. Selling complete systems increases deal size and customer value. Selling services creates recurring revenue but requires operational teams and infrastructure. Skyeton’s answer was to focus on complete, ready-to-deploy systems: aircraft, portable ground station, antennas and payloads that a small team can launch without a runway. It is a reminder that in hardware, the product is rarely just the device.

Moving from B2G toward broader markets

Government contracts provide credibility, but they also tie a company to political cycles and long procurement timelines. As the IMD case describes, Stepura explored ways to broaden Skyeton’s market toward commercial customers, where sales cycles are shorter and less dependent on public budgets.

Applications such as infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring and traffic management fit naturally with a long-endurance aircraft. Diversifying the customer base is one of the classic steps that turns a project-driven engineering company into a scalable business.

Building closer to the market

In 2024 Skyeton launched production in eastern Slovakia, near Prešov, investing several million dollars into a new manufacturing site. The decision brought production inside the European Union, closer to customers and partners, and gave the company access to the EU’s industrial ecosystem and regulatory framework.

The group’s holding structure is based in Estonia, a country known for its business-friendly environment and digital administration. For founders from Ukraine and other emerging markets, this combination of an engineering base at home and corporate and manufacturing presence in the EU is becoming a common model for international growth.

Building a voice in the industry

Stepura has also taken part in public discussions about the future of technology in Europe. At the Lublin Triangle Economic Forum, he joined a panel on high technology and dual-use goods, discussing growing demand for unmanned systems and the role of the dual-use sector in economic growth across Central and Eastern Europe.

For a hardware company, this kind of visibility matters. Industry forums are where partnerships, investors and future customers meet, and founders who can explain where the market is heading often shape it.

Key lessons for hardware founders

• Demanding first customers build better products. Hard requirements early create an engineering advantage later.
• Use the talent you have access to. A concentrated pool of specialised engineers can offset a lack of capital.
• Sell solutions, not devices. Complete systems are harder to commoditise than hardware alone.
• Diversify the customer base. Reducing dependence on one market type makes growth more predictable.
• Put production where the market is. Physical presence in a key region can open doors that exports alone cannot.

Oleksandr Stepura’s experience with Skyeton shows that building deep technology from Ukraine is not only possible but can lead to a company that competes internationally. For founders working on complex hardware anywhere, the path from local engineering team to European manufacturer offers a useful playbook.