Ukraine’s Tencore and France’s Shark Robotics launch joint venture

Ukraine’s Tencore and France’s Shark Robotics have signed a memorandum of understanding and announced the creation of a joint venture, the companies disclosed at the Ukraine-EU Business Forum in Brussels, according to Oboronka.

The agreement was announced under the Build with Ukraine initiative — a framework pushing Ukrainian defense companies to establish co-production partnerships with European manufacturers. The deal pairs one of Ukraine’s most active ground robotics developers with a French company that has built its reputation in firefighting and civil protection robotics, creating a partnership that spans both the military and emergency response domains.

Tencore CEO Maksim Vasylchenko framed the logic of the partnership directly. “In Ukraine, we create solutions under pressure and in real conditions. Together with Shark Robotics, we combine combat robotics and robotics for civil protection. It is this complementarity that makes our partnership strong,” he said. The joint venture will combine Tencore’s battlefield-tested ground robotic systems with Shark Robotics’ expertise in civilian emergency response platforms — two capability sets that share underlying technology but serve different operational audiences.

Tencore’s core product is the TerMIT unmanned ground vehicle platform, a modular combat-proven robotic system that the company has been deploying with Ukrainian armed forces units throughout the war with Russia. The TerMIT platform handles a wide range of battlefield tasks: logistics, medical evacuation, fire support, engineering work including minelaying and demining, and route reconnaissance. The platform has undergone continuous development in active combat conditions — Tencore introduced a TerMIT 2.0 version in September 2025 with a doubled operating range of 40 kilometers and an increased maximum speed of 15 kilometers per hour. More recently, TerMIT received an armored capsule module for casualty evacuation, adding protection for wounded soldiers being extracted under fire. The company has delivered more than 2,000 platforms to Ukrainian troops and transferred 26 systems to six units at its own expense as part of frontline testing and validation.

Shark Robotics brings a different but complementary capability set. Founded in 2016 in La Rochelle, France, the company specializes in ground robots for firefighting, security, and demining — designing and manufacturing all systems in-house. Its flagship Colossus platform is a tracked UGV capable of carrying a 500-kilogram payload, pulling up to 650 kilograms, and operating for up to 12 hours on swappable lithium-ion batteries. Colossus entered global public consciousness in April 2019 when it worked alongside Paris firefighters for 10 hours during the Notre Dame cathedral fire, operating in temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Celsius to suppress the blaze and protect interior works. The platform is in active service with the Paris Fire Brigade and emergency services across France and internationally. Shark Robotics has also delivered 40 Colossus robots to Ukraine to strengthen the country’s resilience against drone attacks — a deployment that gave the French company direct exposure to the Ukrainian operational environment before the formal partnership with Tencore was announced.

The Brussels joint venture announcement is not Tencore’s first European partnership move. At the Munich Security Conference on February 13, 2026, Tencore and Germany’s FERNRIDE — a Munich-based autonomous ground transport startup — announced a joint venture to manufacture TerMIT UGVs in Germany, with systems produced there intended for supply to Ukraine. Tencore also concluded a cooperation agreement with Finnish manufacturer INSTA covering the TerMIT platform. Most recently, Germany’s Quantum Systems announced the creation of Quantum Tencore Industries, a joint venture focused on scaling production of Tencore’s combat-proven unmanned ground systems following the same Build with Ukraine framework. In a matter of months, Tencore has assembled a network of European co-production relationships spanning France, Germany, and Finland — a deliberate strategy of embedding Ukrainian battlefield robotics experience into European defense industrial capacity.

That strategy reflects a broader shift in how European defense procurement is evolving. Ukraine’s war with Russia has generated an unmatched body of real-world data on what ground robotic systems can and cannot do in high-intensity combat: which platforms survive, which fail, which tasks justify robotic deployment, and which require human crews. European militaries and defense ministries are paying close attention. Tencore’s systems have been tested not in simulation or controlled exercises but in continuous frontline operations against a peer adversary with electronic warfare, artillery, and drone capabilities that stress-test every robotic platform thrown at them. That experience is what European partners are buying access to when they sign joint ventures under the Build with Ukraine initiative.

Ukraine’s defense industry did not exist in its current form before February 2022. It has been built under fire, in real time, at a pace that conventional procurement systems cannot match. Tencore’s expanding network of European partnerships is evidence that the continent’s defense establishment has taken notice — and is moving to lock in access to that experience before the war ends and the operational feedback loop closes.