Communication matters
First, the tech: the idea to build handsets didn’t come out of nowhere. Rudominski and his now co-founders first had a startup that suffered from bad timing. “It was a connectivity solution for digital nomads who need to connect to the internet from any country. It would remove the need for getting local SIM cards. Exactly when we were launching that, COVID hit and the entire business model didn’t really work anymore.”
Still, when two years later Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, experience with comms came in handy. Rudominski’s co-founder Alex joined the territorial defense as the invader stood at the gates of Kyiv, and he realized that when it came to communication handsets, “there were two types, either none or very bad ones.”
Being the entrepreneurial type, Alex, in Rudominski’s words, “started working in his free time in the evenings. His commander of the territorial defense unit asked, ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m trying to make a radio.’ He’s like, ‘you haven’t fired a single shot since the beginning. Probably gonna be more useful there.’ That’s how Himera got its start, and for the last three and a half years, we’ve built a company.”
Old-school competition
It’s been quite a journey, though. ”Making a radio is not something you can do in one month. I think most people didn’t even believe that something like this can be done because tactical comms and communication in the military is a legacy market.”
“We have a competitive market where all the players are old companies that have been doing this for a very long period of time.The youngest competitor we have is a company from 2001, so it’s already over 20 years old. Then somebody, who just came to you as a volunteer into the local defense force says, ‘you know, oh, I’m gonna do a radio that is much better than whatever we are using right now,’ you’re just going to wish them luck,” Rudominski says with a grin.
The issue is that military hardware is very different from what civilians use. “You have two types of solutions available to the defenders. You have everything that is commercial. That’s just not gonna work in these conditions. It’s gonna get jammed. It’s gonna get targeted. It’s just gonna get intercepted.”
According to Rudominski, though, the alternative isn’t that great, either: “You get something that is technically relevant, but prohibitively expensive and complex. It’s like an over-engineered type of computer where, yes, if it actually, if you make everything work, it’s a good piece of equipment.” However, this may not be soldier-proof and thus not be practical.
Lessons learned
In the past few years, as the Himera team has built, tested, and refined its product, Rudominski says they’ve learned four lessons.
“First thing is the technical relevancy, meaning it works. It is very hard to jam. It’s hard to intercept, it’s hard to detect. It can pass along data and voice, it can build a mesh, it’s encrypted. It already needs to do all of those things.”
He pauses, then continues. “Then it needs to be scalable. When a customer comes to you with a large order, many manufacturers will tell them that it will take five years. That’s no good, it needs to be very quick. It needs to be months, not years, to deliver the product.”
“It also needs to be much more affordable. Right now, those technically relevant solutions that I mentioned very often they’re prohibitively expensive. Only the most advanced parts of the military can afford them. Not just in Ukraine, anywhere in the world, including the US, which is the most well funded military by a huge margin.”
Learning curve
The third point also folds in with the fourth, namely ease of use. “Very often only special operation forces and marines will be able to afford this type of functionality. We wanted to give that advanced functionality to everyone in the military, including territorial defense forces like where Alex started. These are usually the least funded part of the military.”
This is where the local experience comes into play: “In Ukraine, most of the military is non-professional, they didn’t have 10 years to learn how to operate all the equipment they’re working with. It needs to be to have a very good user experience and user interface because of this.” Rudominski adds that they’ve seen this across the world, too.
This is where the team’s experience with consumer electronics came in. “We know how to build those kinds of easy to use, very adaptable products. Our goal was to make a product that only will take a couple hours to learn to operate on a basic level and then a day to operate on a proficient level. We believe we reached that. They just take it out of the box, learn a bit, play with it a bit, and they’re good to go.”
Scaling fast
For many of Himera’s customers, the fact that handsets can be produced fast is the main draw. “Decision making in Ukraine is much quicker. A lot of the things are needed basically tomorrow and as a company you need to be prepared to supply your products much, much quicker.”
“We were talking to one foreign customer and they said that they needed us to deliver quickly. And me being a bit stupid, instead of asking how quickly, I said we can deliver to you in three weeks. They’re like, ‘oh, oh, we meant like three to six months.’”
Though unwilling to go into details, Rudominski does explain how the company achieves this speed in broad terms. “We build our products completely with off-the-shelf components, meaning we don’t have any export or import controls. All the components that we use are already mass produced in their millions, which means that the same way you can mass produce some Bluetooth earphones, the same way you can kind of mass produce our radio. When we need to scale, we can do it very quickly.”
Battlefield teachings
Of course, like with any discussion of Ukrainian defensetech, the question of battlefield testing comes up. Rudominski is emphatic: “I don’t believe there is a way anyone could come up with such things in the lab.” In his view, in an empirical setting you can debate whether one thing or another could work, “but on the battlefield, this specifically, this option specifically works.”
As a result, Himera finds itself working closely with its end users, and attributes its success to the active relationship with the military. “Most of our hardware has been either used on the battlefield, or at least the test ranges with the active military. If somebody is in defense anywhere in the world right now and they’re not getting the feedback from Ukrainian users, they’re losing a lot of their operational capacity.”
Rudominski doesn’t hesitate to give examples when asked: “We had people calling us, swearing into our ears, being like, ‘what the fuck have you done?’ We then had to cool down and be like, ‘okay, what do you mean what, what is the situation?’ Figure out whether it is something that we actually need to fix or is this something we didn’t teach this specific user how to use.”
And we actually cherish every time this happens, when somebody reaches out and tells us ‘what you’re doing is very bad.’ Is it the functionality that we need to add or is it training that we didn’t specifically provide? What actually shows you as being a good company providing good solutions for our defenders is your ability to react to that feedback and quickly fix any issues.”
“We started with the goal to help the Ukrainian defense forces win this war. So we want to supply the best, the most scalable, and resilient communication systems to them, as much as needed. This is number one. We want them to rely on proper modern, tactical spec radios. The number two is that we want all our allies globally to do the same. After we’ve done that, we want to bring it to all the global markets and build a multi-billion dollar company around that.”
