With a widening roster of high profile talent poached from Apple, SpaceX and Google, the former Google CEO is piloting his drones in Menlo Park and Ukraine.
By Sarah Emerson and Richard Nieva, Forbes Staff
Last year, billionaire technologist Eric Schmidt quietly founded a secretive military drone company, White Stork. Now, the stealth startup has begun testing its artificial intelligence-guided aircraft, both at the Menlo Park headquarters of Schmidt’s family office Hillspire and on the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, where the former Google CEO has continually touted himself as the country’s preeminent defense tech guru.
After Forbes revealed the venture in January, Schmidt quietly renamed it and accelerated its development, which sources in a position to know said involves using artificial intelligence to help drones home in on battlefield targets. Neighbors of Hillspire’s 25,000 square-foot office block, which sits between a row of homes, restaurants and a Caltrain station in the wealthy suburb, recently spotted individuals flying small drones from the building’s gated courtyard. And two people familiar with Schmidt’s activities in Kyiv told Forbes that his team has been testing drone prototypes with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and is soliciting their feedback.
One of these people attended a recent demonstration for parties including the 14th Regiment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a specialized unit that handles drone reconnaissance and warfare. The Ukraine Ministry of Defence did not respond to a request for comment.
Schmidt, who has previously held a government security clearance, and who recently urged U.S. lawmakers to approve the foreign aid package that will provide Ukraine with $61 billion in military funding, has been to the frontline before. In 2023, he traveled to Ukraine to see drone warfare firsthand, which earned him plaudits from Mykhailo Fedorov, the Minister of Digital Transformation, who called him “bold and heroic.”
“He cares for Ukraine and helps us a lot,” Fedorov told Forbes. “He is a legend who has created a lot himself.”
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That includes other tools being used on the frontlines. When a Ukrainian drone operator began a live stream using Google Meet, the tech giant’s video call service, the former Google CEO beamed, Fedorov told Forbes. “Oh, great!” Fedorov recalled Schmidt saying. “I was the one who came up with this product in the first place.”
Schmidt declined to comment.
The venture’s operations are further obfuscated by a constellation of LLCs and associated companies.
White Stork’s drone development has been aided by a steady stream of notable hires. Over the past several months, White Stork has poached at least a dozen employees from Apple, SpaceX, Google, federal government agencies and the billionaire’s own philanthropic organization, Schmidt Futures, multiple sources told Forbes. Their expertise spans machine learning, aerospace, supply chains and procurement. These tactical hires have been accompanied by rank and file recruitment at universities and AI hackathons, some personally hosted by Schmidt himself.
Meanwhile, 69-year-old Schmidt has sought the counsel of Silicon Valley luminaries like his friend Sebastian Thrun, creator of Google’s moonshot lab X, whose advisory role at White Stork Forbes previously reported. Working alongside him is Hendrik Dahlkamp, a former Apple machine learning manager and graduate of Thrun’s Stanford University robotics lab. In 2005, Thrun and Dahlkamp were part of a Stanford team that developed a DARPA Grand Challenge-winning robot. At Google, they worked together on self-driving cars, and Dahlkamp developed the visual mapping technology that would become Street View for Google Maps. Dahlkamp later joined Apple after the security camera startup he cofounded, Lighthouse AI, was acquired by the iPhone maker along with its patents for 3D depth-sensing and facial recognition technology. His LinkedIn profile states that he left the company last October, and sources told Forbes that he and Thrun are developing AI-enabled visual targeting software for Schmidt’s drone project.
At an outpost in Oakland, a White Stork staffer who used to work as a principal space lasers engineer at SpaceX has been collaborating with White Stork senior advisor Damon Vander Lind, who previously served at Thrun’s defunct aviation company Kitty Hawk, said sources with knowledge of the matter. At SpaceX, this project member appeared to be part of the team developing a laser communications system for Starlink satellites. Before that, they worked at satellite imagery company Planet Labs, where they researched the orbit and positioning of nanosatellites.
Along with Dahlkamp and Vander Lind, White Stork’s expanding employee roster includes Mark Stonich, former vice president of sourcing and supply chain sustainability at Google, now heading operations and supply chain at White Stork, and Will Roper, founder of the Schmidt-backed defense startup Istari Digital and a member of the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Board. The team also consists of a former Kitty Hawk senior aerospace engineer, a former State Department defense trade controls official and members of Schmidt’s family office. None of these people responded to a request for comment.
Vander Lind, Stonich and Roper were among a cohort of associates that attended a meeting with Schmidt and Thrun last summer in Kyiv. Also present were senior Ukrainian officials Oleksandr Kamyshin, the country’s wartime minister of strategic industries, and Yulia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister.
An unrelated charity called White Stork that delivers aid to Ukraine already existed when Schmidt chose the same name.
Despite a series of public visits to Kyiv, Schmidt has labored to operate his drone project in stealth. Shortly after Forbes broke the news of his plans for White Stork, the startup rechristened itself “Project Eagle,” according to three sources familiar with the effort. Domain name records for “projecteagle.net,” the email address now used by the project’s members, show that it was newly registered in February.
The venture’s operations are further obfuscated by a constellation of LLCs and associated companies. One such company, called Merops, was incorporated by Vander Lind and the former SpaceX engineer last year, describing its purpose as “aerospace engineering research and development.” Others include Aurelian Industries, Swift Beat and Volya Robotics, which Forbes linked to the project in January. Only Volya Robotics, an Estonian entity incorporated by Hillspire last year, lists Schmidt as an owner. (An unrelated charity called White Stork that delivers aid to Ukraine already existed when Schmidt chose the same name.)
Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Schmidt has positioned himself as a pundit on the conflict, writing several prominent op-eds about the country’s battle strategies and a new age of “networked war.” For the Wall Street Journal, he bullishly predicted that “suicide” or “kamikaze” drones, loitering munitions that opportunistically wait for their targets before obliterating them, would remake warfare. “Like murmurations of starlings, ruthless swarms of AI-empowered kamikaze drones will track mobile targets and algorithmically collaborate to strike past an enemy’s electronic countermeasures,” he wrote.
But a few months later in an op-ed for Time, the brutality of the Ukrainian frontline had tempered his prosings with an “in-the-mud reality” that called for a more apt reference to a well-known student of Nihilism.
“Ground troops, with drones circling overhead, know they’re constantly under the watchful eyes of unseen pilots a few kilometers away,” he wrote with Project Eagle partner Will Roper. “And those pilots know they are potentially in opposing crosshairs watching back. Nietzche’s words come to mind: “And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”