Yangjae corporate research center and Seongnam plant consolidated into the “Giheung Campus” — a one-stop, turn-key infrastructure spanning design, assembly and flight testing
Simultaneous expansion across hardware, AI and software roles — a government-designated military service exemption employer recruiting science and engineering talent
With global demand for counter-unmanned aircraft system (counter-UAS) weapons rising sharply, Airbility has opened its “Giheung Campus,” consolidating research and development with production, and completed a one-stop turn-key value chain in which design changes feed directly into prototype fabrication and flight testing.
Airbility, a deep-tech aerospace and defense company led by co-CEOs Jinmo Lee and Taegyu Ryu, said on [XX] that it has built an integrated process spanning design, assembly and flight testing at the site, funded by USD 7.6 million (KRW 10.5 billion) in cumulative investment, and has begun large-scale hiring across manufacturing and research and development to accelerate the launch of its first counter-drone aircraft this year.
The company recently consolidated its corporate research center in Yangjae, Seoul, and its plant in Seongnam into the Giheung Campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province. Its management and planning organizations have relocated alongside the technical teams, and the full sequence — airframe design, 3D printing, composite machining, airframe assembly, onboard AI integration and flight test and evaluation — now runs as a single continuous process.
The funding is providing momentum for the move into volume production. Airbility, which has secured USD 7.6 million (KRW 10.5 billion) in total capital including a Series A led by Sazze Partners with participation from Stonebridge Ventures and Industrial Bank of Korea, plans to produce the initial batch of the AB-U10 — a net-gun interceptor designed for speeds of approximately 180 kilometers per hour — by the end of this year. It will follow in the first half of next year with the AB-U2 kinetic interceptor and the AB-U4L, a fixed-wing, launcher-deployed interceptor designed for speeds of approximately 300 kilometers per hour, completing a three-aircraft air-to-air hard-kill interception lineup.
Behind the investment is the technical depth and domain expertise of Airbility’s research team. Engineers who led the development of Korea’s KT-1, T-50 and KF-21 aircraft at the Agency for Defense Development, together with engineers from major Korean corporations, have demonstrated a pace of product development that investors cited as a basis for their evaluation. Airbility is now recruiting at scale across manufacturing and research and development to build production capability on top of that validated technology base.
Hiring is proceeding on two balanced tracks: hardware, and AI and software. On the hardware side, which supports the first commercial production line, the company is adding structural design engineers in its Airframe Hardware Development Division, unmanned aircraft manufacturing engineers and avionics engineers to strengthen the stability of the manufacturing process.
An equal share of hiring is directed at the AI and software talent that will advance its next-generation unmanned aircraft systems. Open roles span the breadth of unmanned aircraft technology: reinforcement learning and autonomous decision-making researchers; ground-system AI engineers (multi-target fusion, LLM operations support); onboard AI engineers (Jetson Orin NX, ROS2); simulation engineers (PIL, HIL, Isaac Sim, Unreal); and ground control system (GCS) and flight control software (OFP) engineers. Airbility is also a government-designated employer under Korea’s military service exemption program for research personnel and industrial technical personnel, and is recruiting through that channel across multiple roles to secure science and engineering talent.
“The global counter-drone market is a race in which success is decided by how quickly and reliably a company can deliver a single weapon system,” said Jinmo Lee, co-CEO of Airbility. “With capital, facilities and people now aligned within this year, we will concentrate the entire organization on completing our first commercialization this year and taking the lead in the global unmanned aircraft market.”
Founded in November 2023, Airbility validated its technology in December 2025 by completing transition flights across three prototype aircraft, and secured an additional USD 2.2 million (KRW 3 billion) in R&D funding after being selected for the Korea AeroSpace Administration’s 2026 Scale-Up TIPS program. The company is currently discussing exports and partnerships with counterparties in more than nine countries across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America, with four memoranda of understanding and two joint ventures in progress.
[Photo] A view of Airbility’s Giheung Campus.
https://www.forbeskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=402525