After multiple sources previously told the Guardian that Erik Prince – Maga ally and founder of the now defunct mercenary company Blackwater – was looking to work with Ukraine’s invaluable drone sector, recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents confirm he now is.

Swarmer, which bills itself as a battle-tested Ukrainian startup specializing in autonomous drone software, filed for an initial public offering and has recruited Prince to help sell the company as non-executive chair.

“Swarmer is a software-first defense technology company focused on collaborative autonomy and intelligent swarming, originating from the cauldron of modern combat in Ukraine,” said Prince in a letter to prospective stockholders in the filing, released earlier this month.

“Since April 2024, Swarmer’s platform has been deployed in Ukraine with more than 100,000 real-world missions in active combat environments, informing the software and machine-learning models that feed into it.”

Defense industry hawks have eyed the battlefield intelligence the Ukrainian military has accrued in over four years of combat with Russia. The war has caused close to 2m casualties, but global military elites, like Prince, are also seeing glimpses of what a future war between world powers might look like and what products the US or its geopolitical rival China will need to buy.

Drones, which now account for roughly 70% of all combat casualties in Ukraine, are top of the list.

On its website, Swarmer lauds endorsements from the newly installed Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who is aggressively lobbying the US and other Nato allies to buy into his country’s weapons industry. Swarmer products, powered by artificial intelligence, are on the cutting edge of the future of war, with software enabling pilots to control drone swarms.

Swarmer mentions the potential profits in drone warfare in the same filing, noting to investors that “defense forces, including the US Department of Defense [and] Nato allies”, see “autonomous drone operations” as “requiring immediate investment”.

In a July announcement on the grounds of the Pentagon, the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, declared that the US was “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance” in a memorandum calling for the mass production, purchase and adoption of all unmanned vehicle platforms.

“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” he said.

Prince has made drones a central focus of his recent business. Last year he was involved in a controversial drone assassination program in Haiti, while recent reporting puts his mercenaries in the employ of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as drone operators.

“Erik is trying to network with companies here, for Congo,” said an executive at a multinational defense contractor with business in Ukraine. “He poached some operators who served here too.”

Through a spokesperson, Prince declined to comment on his work in Ukraine and about recruiting drone operators from there to serve in the DRC. Swarmer did not respond to a request for comment regarding its relationship with Prince.

In the fall, Swarmer, which advertises several “mission templates” for drones ranging from surveillance to something it calls a “Killbox”, secured millions in investment.

Prince and a legion of Silicon Valley executives, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, have descended on Kyiv in recent years looking to score government contracts and access to both the software powering combat drones and the Ukrainian operators pioneering their flight.

But even as a frontman, Prince comes to Swarmer as a highly controversial figure who is also a known associate of Donald Trump’s longtime adviser Steve Bannon. Blackwater – Prince’s former company that made millions in contracts with the Pentagon and the CIA – has become synonymous with the corruption and failures of the war in Iraq. A 2007 massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of Prince’s mercenaries led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and the company changing its name.

Prince eventually resigned as the CEO in 2009, but hung around the defense contracting world and pursued ventures in China, the United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, South Sudan and Ukraine, where in 2020 he pitched Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a multibillion-dollar private army to help settle what was a frozen war in the eastern Donbas region.

In September, multiple sources described to the Guardian how Prince was making several trips to Kyiv, courting Ukrainian drone makers who might be eager to sell him into their business – Swarmer fitting the profile of the type of company with which he was looking to do business.

“I guess he finally found the company to invest in, in Ukraine,” said a former American special forces soldier with experience in Ukraine and knowledge of the defense companies operating there.

Swarmer has featured in western media since its founding in 2023, along with several other Ukrainian tech companies emerging from the flurry of Pentagon and Nato weapons transfers to Ukraine and the rush to continue resisting Russia’s full-scale invasion by any means necessary.

Mostly outgunned against the Kremlin’s vast arsenal and coffers, Ukraine has turned to drones and homegrown solutions as asymmetric equalizers. Recent remarks by Zelenskyy puts Swarmer among hundreds of other Ukrainian drone companies that are now active in the country.

“As of today, we have 450 companies producing drones, 40 to 50 of which are top-tier,” said Zelenskyy in a recent speech. “Everyone wants to invest, so 2026 will be a year of investment in our technologies, primarily in drones.”