Unmanned air vehicle (UAV) producer Tekever is to invest over £400 million ($532 million) to boost its activities in the UK and add more than 1,000 employees to its workforce.
Dubbed Overmatch, the industrial effort was announced on 2 May, as the company’s AR3 tactical UAV was named as the platform element of a new autonomous collaborative platform now available for frontline use by the Royal Air Force (RAF).
Named StormShroud, the system will use Leonardo UK’s BriteStorm stand-in jammer technology to disrupt enemy integrated air defence system radars in support of the Eurofighter Typhoon and Lockheed Martin F-35B.
To be made over a five-year period, Tekever’s investment will be in “research, infrastructure, and defence technology development in the UK”, the company says. This will include a focus on autonomy and artificial intelligence, it adds.
“This strategic commitment to the UK is more than an industrial expansion – it is a plan to position the UK to lead the transformation of Europe’s defence landscape by delivering faster, more adaptive capabilities that stay ahead of evolving threats,” says Tekever chief executive Ricardo Mendes.
The airframer notes that the RAF’s new StormShroud system draws on its extensive experience with providing the AR3 to Kyiv’s armed forces.
“Since 2022, the AI-enabled AR3 has logged over 10,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine, autonomously detecting and tracking vehicles and vessels in contested environments,” it says.
“Every day we are working towards changing the AR3 and adapting it to make it more survivable,” Mendes says. “It doesn’t get tougher than that,” he notes of the conflict in eastern Europe, “so the level of reliability is extremely high”.
Tekever has previously said that its UAV has “undergone more than 100 design iterations, shaped by constant feedback from frontline operations and real-time mission requirements” in Ukraine.
Mendes notes that this now enables the long-endurance AR3 to conduct missions in a complex radar frequency environment, relaying intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information more than 108nm (200km) by datalink.
“This year we will be producing several hundred systems, but we are quickly expanding our capacity for AR3s and AR5s over the next five years, so that is going to come up a lot,” he says. The company is currently in the process of starting production of the larger AR5 in the UK.
“We want to be able to not only produce the existing systems, but all of the products that we will be shipping out in the future, here in the UK,” Mendes says.
