Germany funds 50,000 Auterion-guided Shrike drones for Ukraine

Berlin is paying about 90 million euros to put Auterion's Skynode S terminal guidance on 50,000 of Skyfall's Shrike FPV drones, one of the largest known Western drone orders for Kyiv.

Germany is funding 50,000 Shrike attack drones for Ukraine, an order worth about 90 million euros ($103 million) and one of the biggest known drone purchases for Kyiv by a Western government, Reuters reported July 12, citing a source familiar with the deal. The airframes come from Skyfall, the Ukrainian manufacturer behind the Vampire heavy bomber, and each one ships with Auterion's Skynode S autonomy module and Strike software.

That package locks onto moving targets in the terminal phase of flight and keeps tracking after jamming cuts GPS or the radio link, Auterion said in a July 13 release announcing the partnership from Kyiv. A later software update will give the same airframes swarming capability, with no hardware changes. Deliveries began this week and are set to conclude over the coming months. CEO Lorenz Meier called it the largest partnership in the company's history.

The contract works out to roughly 1,800 euros ($2,050) per drone including ground control stations and program overhead, Meier said, per Resilience Media, which noted that is above Ukraine's cheapest manually piloted models but far below typical Western prices for precision-guided munitions. Auterion itself names only a European NATO nation as the funder. Skyfall confirmed Berlin's involvement to Reuters; Germany's defense ministry declined to comment, citing operational security.

The order is separate from the contract that scaled Auterion into Ukraine, a $50 million Pentagon buy of 33,000 strike kits announced in July 2025 and since delivered in full, Meier told Reuters. He put Auterion's 2026 pipeline at 100,000 drones for Ukraine across several hardware makers and Western funders. The airframe has caught Washington's eye too: the fiber-optic Shrike 10-F topped the first-round leaderboard in the Pentagon's Drone Dominance competition, part of a $1.1 billion push to buy hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones.

Both companies claim Shrike strikes have destroyed an Mi-8 helicopter, a TOS-1A heavy flamethrower system, electronic warfare sets, armor and artillery; those figures come from the manufacturers, not independent assessments. What Berlin is buying at 1,800 euros a unit is precision at wartime volume: a Ukrainian line supplies the mass, Auterion's software supplies the accuracy. The swarm update arrives later on software alone, and the remaining airframes are due this year.