Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s cofounder, said there’s a common misconception about his company’s signature software-powered drone: People say it needs to be armed.
The more experienced militaries who work with Shield AI, however, know they don’t need that capability in modern war, Tseng told Business Insider.
“Who doesn’t ask for that? The US military doesn’t ask for that because we understand joint fires. The Ukrainians don’t ask for it anymore, either,” said the former Navy SEAL, who is Shield AI’s president.
The V-BAT, a vertical takeoff and landing drone that uses artificial intelligence to fly in jammed environments, has primarily been used for intelligence and reconnaissance missions in high-profile conflict zones such as Ukraine. Shield AI said the V-BAT flew over 200 missions there in 2025.
The drone is still meant to be a multi-mission platform, Tseng said, and Shield AI has been exploring ways to mount weapons on it. The firm announced a partnership last month with South Korean arms manufacturer LIG Nex1 to equip the V-BAT with six-pound guided missiles.
“But at the end of the day, look: I describe V-BAT as a mini predator, reaper drone,” Tseng said. “That’s the mission it’s doing, which is: It’s finding targets. And it’s hard to find targets, you have to be out there for a long period of time.”
Kim Hong-Ji/REUTERS
To be fair, the MQ-9 Reaper is also commonly equipped with missiles.
However, Tseng said sophisticated militaries already have a vast array of other weapons that can turn the V-BAT’s intel into a precision strike.
“If you have been in these combat zones, the US allies who fought closely with us in Afghanistan, they do not ask for organic fires on board the V-Bat,” Tseng said. “Because everybody is so used to just saying: ‘Okay, I have a targeting package. What fires asset do I have lined up? Is it a one-way attack drone? Is it HIMARS? Is it artillery? Is it an SM-6? SM-3?”
“Doesn’t matter. You can find weapons,” he added. “The weapons are available. You need, actually, more intelligence.”
V-BAT’s early use in Ukraine
This was a framework that Ukraine still needed to improve when the V-BAT began spotting targets there in early 2024, Tseng said. The drone is meant to fly for over 13 hours and be easily deployable, requiring a two-person launch crew and no runway.
Tseng said that while Ukraine excelled in tactical drone warfare, its troops weren’t used to having a long-range asset that could spot targets for regular strategic attacks as the US military did.
“The strategic effects would happen, but they would be rare,” he said. “They’d be very, very deliberately planned operations, very expensive operations, things like what they did to the Russian runways with sending quadcopters deep into Russia via trucks.”
Ukrainian drone teams would use the V-BAT to find important targets, such as Russian S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, only to realize they hadn’t linked up with the right teams to strike them, Tseng said.
“We’d say: ‘Why didn’t you guys have these weapons lined up?’ They’d say: ‘Oh, well, we didn’t think to coordinate,'” Tseng said.
Since then, Kyiv’s forces have been using intelligence from V-BATs to carry out strikes with systems such as one-way attack drones or US-made HIMARS, Tseng said.
“There was a lot of learning over the past year for the Ukrainians,” he added.
