Who and How Involves Russian Startups in Defense Order Work
The National Technology Initiative was supposed to give young startups a chance and make Russia a global technology leader. Now, the companies it sponsors are working for the war effort and complaining that there is no other market in Russia
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Two female soldiers from the 1st Slavic Brigade, known by their call signs as Yozhik and Vzhik, stand against the backdrop of a poster featuring Joseph Stalin. Yozhik reports that they fled Donetsk for Moscow in a hurry, fearing for their lives. It is October 2024: a scandal is erupting around the deaths of two UAV specialists, Ernest and Goodwin, who, in their final video, accused their commander of drug trafficking and working for the West. Yozhik is the widow of Goodwin, one of the deceased.
Just a year ago, the women were much more optimistic. They were preparing to participate in combat operations and were undergoing training at the Academy of Unmanned Aerial Systems. “We flew, threw grenades, escorted, observed, adjusted fire… There are many men in our group who came back from across the ribbon [from the front]. Highly motivated fighters, and we are in no way inferior to them!” shared Yozhik.
The courses were held in Yekaterinburg, based at the University Technopark — a local partner of the Skolkovo Innovation Center. The Academy of Unmanned Aerial Systems (ABAS for short) was launched by the Yekaterinburg-based company Future Lab.
The Future Lab founder, Alexander Lemekh, became interested in drones back in the 2000s at the university, in the robotics club. Future Lab’s flagship product is Kanatokhod, a drone that can repair power lines. Their latest development is a mobile charging station for drones. There are also the Mukha and Muravey drones, equipped with thermal imagers — they have been used in search and rescue operations for lost children in the forest, for example.
In Russia, the company struggled to achieve mass production for a long time, the Future Lab chief engineer Alexei Sokolov complained — according to him, government agencies were wary of concluding contracts for innovative products from Future Lab due to the peculiarities of federal legislation.
The company’s fortunes improved after it received support from the National Technology Initiative (NTI), the launch of which was announced in 2014 by Vladimir Putin. Its goal is to ensure Russia’s “technological leadership and sovereignty.” It was assumed that under the auspices of the organization, efforts would be combined between teams, organizations, universities, research centers, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and finally, compatriots engaged in science abroad would be invited to work together on technological innovations in various fields. However, after the start of the war, NTI residents shifted their focus — to defense.
By 2021, NTI received 50 billion rubles from the budget, and another 50 billion was provided by private businesses. In 2022–2023, NTI structures received more than 30 billion rubles in targeted contributions, IStories calculated based on Russian Federal Tax Service data.
NTI is a whole ecosystem: unions based on scientific organizations and universities; technology competitions, olympiads, and clubs; “infrastructure centers” that help overcome administrative barriers, improve legislation, and search for partners and customers.
NTI also promises funding for technology startups. The same Future Lab received 300 million rubles from the budget and another 150 million from the state corporation VEB.RF. In return, the NTI joined the founding members of Future Lab in 2022, and now it holds 54% of the company.
According to the organization’s report, the funding was received specifically for the development and market launch of Kanalokhod – an automatic system for the maintenance and repair of electrical networks based on an unmanned aerial vehicle, claimed to be the first in the world. It was assumed that the first clients could be Rosseti within the country; Saudi Electricity and Dubai Electricity in the Middle East. Expansion into markets worldwide was planned.
We managed to find only two government contracts concluded by Future Lab for the entire period of its operation — one with the Novosibirsk Ministry of Emergency Situations for the supply of an unmanned aerial vehicle construction kit, and the other with Rosseti, for research and development. Meanwhile, the company’s revenue in 2023 increased sharply — from 22 to 317 million rubles. Future Lab, under the management of the NTI, finally entered the market — the defense market.
The story of two drones
“If we are talking about the Russian market, today it is drones for the special military operation and drones for education. The rest is not a market, just one-off, fragmented deliveries. The demand allowed us to enter serial production. And it’s not education,” admitted a representative of Future Lab at the end of 2023 at the NTI BarCamp forum.
Around the same time, reports appeared in local media about a new company — ABAS (Academy of Unmanned Aerial Systems), which trains military drone operators and produces Hornet and Dragonfly copters for dropping various types of ammunition and laying mines on roads. A representative of ABAS told reporters that both Hornet and Dragonfly are successfully used in the war in Ukraine. “We spent a lot of time adapting the payload to make it convenient for the military,” he said. At the opening of the academy, its creators demonstrated how to knock out a mock-up of an Abrams tank with a drone.
There is no registered company with such a name in Russia, according to the legal entities register. However, IStories found a mention of ABAS on the Future Lab website. The Hornet and Dragonfly drones from ABAS are outwardly identical to the models that Future Lab produces under the names Mukha and Muravey.
Exactly how many Hornets and Dragonflies Future Lab is currently supplying to the front is unknown. However, according to the company’s official statements in November 2024, it produces about one hundred drones per month.
Methodologists and technological sovereignty
The NTI presents its structure in the form of a complex matrix — a “snail,” which shows how its priority areas and forms of support, as well as key projects, are interconnected.
The method of implementing “technological sovereignty” is presented in the form of various diagrams: for example, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (on the NTI website, he is somehow listed as “Maslov”) and Mendeleev’s periodic table — only with technologies instead of chemical elements.
All this resembles the approaches of methodologists — a movement founded by Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Russian philosopher and founder of Moscow Methodological Circle. He and his followers preferred to describe all processes — whether historical, technical, or personal — using diagrams. Understanding how thinking works will make it possible to organize activity: engineering, organizational, political, methodologists believe.
One of the highest-ranking followers of Shchedrovitsky’s movement is the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Sergei Kiriyenko. A former patron of the NTI in the government — Andrei Belousov, the current Minister of Defense — is also close to the methodologists. Belousov has been interested in methodology since the 1990s.
The Executive Director of The Platform for The National Technological Initiative, Andrei Siling, runs the Telegram channel Healthy Way of Thinking, where he talks about his course Methodology and Tools of Thinking. NTI supports regional Mind Clubs, and NTI General Director Dmitry Peskov (full namesake of Putin’s press secretary) has spoken at methodologists’ conferences.
NTI residents are connected not only by money but also by philosophy. For example, we found an essay by the chief engineer of the same Future Lab, Alexei Sokolov, about his fascination with “games” — a form of collective work that Shchedrovitsky practiced with fellow scientists and conducted for the management of large enterprises. “Games” are one of the pillars of methodology.
Followers of the movement model the processes that occur in a particular area and then organize “reflections” where participants reflect on their game choices. Subsequently, game practices penetrated directly into politics: for example, in the late 1990s, Shchedrovitsky Jr. conducted a “game” for Sergei Kiriyenko and Boris Nemtsov.
85-year-old Arnold Shastin, the scientific director of Future Lab, also participated in the “games,” according to Sokolov’s essay. The company’s founder and CEO, Alexander Lemekh, held an Engineering Games for schoolchildren, where he introduced himself as a “game practitioner.” In 2018, Future Lab organized games in Dubai: representatives of 30 companies spent a week at the Pearl Park Hotel, working on planning the “development of the country, the electric power industry, and each individual.”
One of the NTI projects since 2024 has been unmanned aviation research and production centers for its residents: sites with equipment and an area of several thousand square meters, and testing grounds for flight tests.
In return, recipients of NTI support must launch mass production of new types of drones and their components, and develop prototypes or experimental models of new types of UAVs. Startups are funded either through grants or through contributions to the authorized capital in exchange for a share.
IStories discovered that at least several other UAV startups supported by the NTI are working for the defense industry.
For example, Integral Robotic Technologies (IRT) from Bashkortostan. At the end of 2022, the company’s chief engineer, Ramil Ilyasov, said that IRT was developing a new long-range unmanned aircraft that could be used “in practically all sectors of the national economy:” oil and gas, agriculture, and forestry. At the Dronesphere Forum, curated by the NTI, one of IRT’s drones found its first buyers, and the machine itself was developed as part of the NTI’s University-2035 (the university is one of the three key divisions of the NTI, which offers lectures, online courses, and acceleration programs in “high-tech areas:” from AI and drones to the green economy).
At the same time, at least a third of the drones currently produced by the company, according to DefenseNews, are Scout and Dark Wing kamikaze drones. An IRT employee advertised the company’s drones in Telegram channel Bespilotniki as suitable for “operational reconnaissance” and “mine delivery,” IStories discovered.
The Scout, in terms of its external appearance, dimensions, construction, payload capacity, and characteristics — it is made of polymeric foam — is identical to the Chinese Sonicmodell AR Wing Pro. Military analyst Pavel Luzin believes that it may actually be a Chinese drone: “If something is assembled from Chinese components, then it has at least some external individuality.” IRT did not respond to questions from IStories.
Another company, Ninsar, is developing QuadroSim, a drone simulator for training UAV specialists and, as stated on the company’s website, is suitable “for both military personnel and students of military educational institutions.” Ninsar founder Egor Sechinsky has participated in the National Technology Olympiad and The Kruzhok Movement, which operate on the basis of the NTI, since his school years. He is now 23 years old, and he continues to collaborate with the NTI. His company’s profit has already exceeded 100 million rubles, and one of its key customers is the defense concern Almaz-Antey.
The NTI was unable to answer questions from IStories by the time of publication. Future Lab and IRT also did not respond to our questions.