Somewhere in the Soviet Union, before the maps changed, a boy's parents woke at four in the morning to listen to a radio they were not supposed to own. Voice of America, faint under the jamming. It was illegal. It was also, in that house, the only reliable window onto what was actually happening in the world. Alex Fink has spent the decades since trying to widen that window - first with software that filters your news, now with software that flies drones in coordinated swarms. On paper those are two different companies. Up close, they are one long argument about who gets to know what is real.
Today Fink is President and US CEO of Swarmer, a defense-autonomy company that went public on the Nasdaq in March 2026 under the ticker SWMR. Before that he founded Otherweb, an AI news app he registered as a public benefit corporation. The résumé reads like a swerve. His own explanation does not. The problem he keeps circling is the quality of the information that runs the world - what people believe, and now what machines decide - and the two companies are just different altitudes of the same idea.
01 — OriginsA childhood spent reading between the lines
Fink's family escaped roughly three months before the Soviet Union collapsed and war broke out in his hometown. He has described the moment it all became concrete: a photograph of tanks rolling down the street where he grew up. When you have seen the gap between the official story and the tanks, you do not forget how much accurate information is worth. It is not an abstraction. It is the difference between staying and running.
He did not go straight into media, though. He trained as an engineer, earning a computer science degree from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 2006, then spent roughly fifteen years in engineering and executive roles. Somewhere in the middle he did something a lot of engineers never do on purpose: he went and got an MBA in marketing, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Isenberg School. An engineer who deliberately learned to sell. It shows up later in the way he talks about products - always half about the technology, half about who is going to believe in it.
02 — OtherwebNot fact-checking. Form-checking.
In 2021 Fink founded Otherweb, an app that uses AI to strip the junk out of the news - paywalls, clickbait, autoplaying video, affiliate links, the persuasion machinery that has quietly colonized the feed. His key distinction is worth sitting with. Disinformation, he argues, is content that is intentionally false. Junk is content that is monetized regardless of whether it is true. And junk, in his telling, is the bigger problem, because there is vastly more of it and nobody thinks of themselves as the villain producing it.
So Otherweb does not mainly try to rule articles true or false. It reads their shape. It favors pieces that avoid attention-grabbing language, that cite external references for their claims, that state things plainly and skip the persuasion tricks. Fink calls the difference form-checking rather than fact-checking. It is a quietly radical reframing, because it sidesteps the endless, unwinnable fight over what is true and asks a more answerable question: is this article built to inform you, or built to grab you?
He is honest about the parts he has not solved. As the cost of generating content falls toward zero and AI-personalized news becomes normal, he worries out loud about who funds the expensive, slow work of investigative journalism. He does not pretend to have the answer. That willingness to name the unsolved bit - rather than paper over it with a slogan - is a recurring Fink move.
03 — SwarmerBorn in a war, built for the swarm
Swarmer was founded in May 2023, in the middle of the war in Ukraine, by Serhii Kupriienko and Fink. The battlefield problem was blunt: drones had become decisive, but each one still needed a human pilot, and humans do not scale. Swarmer's answer is software - what Fink calls the software brain - that lets drones do the things humans want them to do but cannot do fast enough or in enough numbers. One operator, instead of babysitting one aircraft, can direct hundreds. Air, sea, ground, and stationary assets can act as a single coordinated force. In military terms that is combined arms; in software terms it is a scheduling and coordination problem that happens to have wings.
The Apple model
- Vertically integrated
- Own hardware + software
- One sealed stack
- Beautiful, closed
The Microsoft model
- Hardware-agnostic
- Software runs everywhere
- Works across many drones
- The layer underneath
That framing is the most Fink thing about the whole company. He compares the emerging drone-software market to the personal computer wars of the 1980s. Companies like Anduril and Shield AI, he says, are the Apple of this era: vertically integrated, hardware and software and autonomy fused into one gorgeous, sealed stack. Swarmer is choosing to be Microsoft - the software that runs across a wide range of hardware, the layer everyone else builds on top of. It is a contrarian bet in a field currently in love with owning the whole thing.
The traction has been fast. Swarmer flew its first combat mission in April 2024. By the time it went public it had logged more than 100,000 missions. It raised a $15M Series A in September 2025, part of roughly $17.7M in total funding, and Fink stepped up from President to US CEO that same month. In March 2026 it listed on the Nasdaq. In July 2026 it announced a partnership with Brightline on AI data collection and drone interoperability for the U.S. Department of War. For a company that did not exist before the war that created it, that is a compressed arc.
04 — The timelineFrom radio in the dark to the opening bell
05 — The patternOne obsession, two altitudes
There is a small detail hiding in plain sight on Fink's LinkedIn profile. His handle is temuchin43 - Temujin, the birth name of the man who became Genghis Khan, remembered for taking scattered forces and welding them into one coordinated force. Read too much into it and you are doing exactly the pattern-hunting Otherweb was built to filter. Read nothing into it and you miss that coordination at scale is, quite literally, the product both of his companies sell.
Because that is the through-line. Otherweb is coordination applied to information: sorting the signal from the flood so a person can actually decide what is real. Swarmer is coordination applied to machines: letting hundreds of them move as one so an operator can actually decide what to do. In both cases the enemy is the same - noise, junk, the overwhelming volume that makes good judgment impossible - and the tool is the same: software that imposes order without pretending to be human.
Fink is pragmatic rather than utopian about all of it. He does not claim to have fixed the news, and he is careful about the ethics of building autonomy for the battlefield. What he offers instead is a consistent read on the world: that the quality of information - and increasingly the quality of machine decisions - is the thing that quietly determines how everything else turns out. He grew up on the wrong side of that gap, in a house that woke before dawn to hear the truth through the static. He has been building on the other side of it ever since.