Defence Builder, @diiacityunion , and @generalcherry.fpv in partnership with @ukraine_housedc , gathered over 100 investors, policymakers, and defence industry executives in Washington, D.C. for a dedicated forum on Ukraine’s defence tech sector and its partnership potential with the United States.
The room included senior representatives from the @statedept , the @deptofwar , the Defense Innovation Unit,congressional offices, and U.S. defence investment funds. The focus was concrete: co-development, joint ventures, IP structuring, and market entry — the building blocks of a U.S.-Ukraine defence partnership that outlasts the war.
The discussion happened against a backdrop of $2.7 trillion in global military expenditure, NATO allies committing to over $1.5 trillion in additional annual defence spending, and a Ukrainian sector valued at $6.8 billion and growing fast. The gap between allied demand and proven technology supply is real — and closing it is exactly what we showed up to work on.
Here’s what the room looked like and what was said. →
🔥Defence Builder has expanded. We are now a full defence tech ecosystem!
Swipe to see how it all works 👉
In 2024, @sigma_software , @kse.ua , and @buntaraerospace built Defence Builder around one belief: Ukrainian technologies can become world-class and a foundation of the country’s future economy.
We started as an accelerator. But Ukraine’s defence market grew to $4.8B — with investment jumping from $10M in 2023 to $129M in 2025. Acceleration alone was no longer enough. So we expanded.
We are launching new directions to give the market what it needs most — capital, expertise, intelligence, and infrastructure. Defence Builder is now three directions:
🔹 DB Accelerator keeps growing — we scout early-stage defence tech teams and develop them end-to-end: from working prototype to frontline-validated, market-ready technology. Two batches done, Batch 3.0 underway.
🔹 DB Fund I is a $5M VC investing in defence and dual-use companies from pre-seed to Series A. For founders, it’s capital with deep market access. For investors, it’s a curated, battlefield-tested pipeline — built from the inside.
🔹 DB Capabilities is a set of specialized services — sector intelligence (with KSE Institute and 20+ analysts), venture deals advisory, defense-specific due diligence, and corporate governance aligned with EU and US standards. For any company, investor, or institution operating in defence.
Daria Yaniieva @daryaaay is leading the ecosystem as President — and we’ll be sharing much more about each direction, the market, and what we’re building next.
Link in bio for details🔗
New joint report by Defence Builder, @kse.ua and @brave1ua is out now!
Key figures:
🔹 $6.8B — Ukraine’s defence tech market size in 2025
🔹 UAV production up 137%, UGV up 488%, EW systems up 215%
🔹 $129M+ raised by Ukrainian defence companies in investments and grants in 2025
🔹 $690B — long-term post-war defence and reconstruction potential over 10 years
Here’s what the numbers actually tell us:
🔹 War compressed a decade of defence innovation into three years — producing a manufacturing base that is battle-tested, cost-efficient, and impossible to replicate in a peacetime environment
🔹 Ukraine has shifted from defence technology consumer to producer — with manufacturers, active investment rounds, and an export-ready industrial base
🔹 The post-war market is not a projection. The infrastructure, the talent, and the track record are already here
Behind every percentage point of growth is a founder, an engineer, or a defender who turned a battlefield problem into a product.
This is a market worth being proud of. We built this study to make sure others see it the same way.
Send this to anyone who still doubts Ukraine’s defence market — and to anyone who hasn’t seen what’s actually being built here. The data tends to change minds.
👉Swipe for the full story.
🔗Full report in bio.
Defence Builder’s Investment Manager & Tech Scout Andrii Hryshchuk joined the University Defense Tech Forum as both a workshop facilitator and jury member — he walked university teams through what defense investors actually look for in a pitch, and then evaluated the results.
13 teams from universities across Ukraine and Europe presented defense-oriented software. The range was impressive: drone detection systems, combat simulation tools, battlefield data infrastructure.
Three winners:
🥇 University of Liverpool @livuni — detection and identification of UAVs using mmWave MIMO radars
🥈 Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, NAS of Ukraine — software that replicates a combat radar interface, reducing dependence on physical systems during military training
🥉 Technical University of Munich @tu.muenchen — a data processing layer for multi-domain drone systems that aggregates battlefield analytics and routes them to a Battlefield Management System, reducing operator workload.
Ukraine is a live laboratory for defense tech — and that’s only an asset if the right connections are made: between battlefield-tested innovation and academic research, between defense companies and university teams, between Ukrainian institutions and global partners.
Thank you to all 13 teams — and to European Defense Tech Hub, Kyiv Defense Tech Week, our co-founder @kse.ua , and @brave1ua .
This is what a functional academic-defense pipeline looks like when the right institutions decide to build it together.
During our delegation’s visit to Sweden, seven Ukrainian defence tech companies met with senior Swedish defence, investment, and industry leaders at a closed-door lunch hosted by SITE at the Stockholm School of Economics.
General Cherry, Sine Engineering, TOLOKA, Tencore, MaXon Systems, Huless, and Trinity Robotics — each presented combat-validated systems and held direct conversations with defence procurement officials, defence primes, institutional investors, senior government representatives, defence tech founders, diplomatic leadership, and researchers from Sweden’s leading defence and engineering universities.
The discussion with Sweden’s top defence and investment decision-makers focused on how to structure Swedish-Ukrainian joint ventures and co-production, how to move battlefield-proven Ukrainian systems into NATO and EU supply chains, where investment capital should go in Ukraine’s defence tech sector, and what certification and IP frameworks are needed to scale this cooperation.
We thank Torbjörn Becker, Anna Anisimova and the SITE team for making this happen, and our Swedish friends for the open doors.
Swipe through for the key points from the discussion, the numbers behind Ukraine’s defence tech market, and why this conversation matters now 👉
Defence Builder and seven battle-proven Ukrainian defence tech companies joined the first-ever Ukrainian Defence Tech Delegation at UAS Forum Sweden 2026 — Scandinavia’s largest and longest-running drone conference.
Our delegation covered three domains of unmanned systems: air — @generalcherry.fpv , Sine Engineering, MaXon Systems, Huless; ground — @tencore.llc , @trinity.robotics ; and sea — TOLOKA. The delegation was led by Artem Petrenko, President of @sigma_software and Defence Builder co-founder, and co-organised together with SUBA.
Each company demonstrated its systems at the exhibition and in direct product sessions with procurement officials and military end-users. The delegation showcased the full spectrum of Ukrainian unmanned capabilities — from FPV strike and autonomous intercept to underwater autonomy and ground logistics — all validated under real combat conditions and ready for integration into allied defence architectures.
Our delegation met with Ukraine’s Ambassador to Sweden Svitlana Zalishchuk and held working meetings with Sweden’s senior defence and civil defence leadership, Swedish Armed Forces command, NATO officials, FMV procurement and R&D heads, and partner-nation delegations. The conversations were concrete — interoperability, procurement pathways, and the industrial logic of integrating Ukrainian battlefield-proven technology into Nordic and European defence supply chains.
Sweden is one of Ukraine’s most committed defence partners — total military aid has exceeded €9.6 billion as of early 2026, with a 21st support package of €1.2 billion announced in February, including air defence, artillery, and drones, and €4 billion in comprehensive support planned for 2026.
200+ defence professionals. Two days of live demos, working conversations on interoperability and procurement, and real access to Northern Europe’s defence decision-makers.
Our thanks to Yuliia Rossoshko and SUBA (Swedish-Ukrainian Business Association) for the support in organising the Ukrainian delegation, and to Urban Wahlberg and Richard Granberg for eleven years of building UAS Forum Sweden.
Photo credits: @jonastborg
Our President Daria Yaniieva wrote an op-ed for @nv.ua on the gap between the value Ukrainian defence tech creates and the capital it attracts.
Global defence tech raised $7B+ in VC in 2025. Ukraine, the country that largely triggered this wave, saw $129M total. Meanwhile, just three segments of the Ukrainian market already reach $6.8B.
The task we set for ourselves at Defence Builder is to close that distance: produce structured market data, so investors can form a thesis, build corporate governance and financial reporting to the standards that due diligence requires, create independent product validation so combat performance translates into something an investment committee can work with, and support founders in becoming visible to global capital without pulling them away from what they do best.
🔗Full op-ed → link in bio
On 28 April, Defence Builder Accelerator became the first non-governmental accelerator to host a dedicated NATO AQAP standards workshop, bringing together 16 defence companies from Ukraine, Finland, Denmark, Estonia and the UK, alongside NATO's D2IA, the Alliance's headquarters in Brussels, UCDI, Baryon Fund VC, and Danish consultancy VARDIAN. Our partner 17Tech joined the session with their teams to reinforce cross-ecosystem collaboration.
Each participant brought in their own expertise and perspective. UCDI set the market context, NATO's D2IA brought the institutional weight, the UNITE - Brave NATO spoke on practical alignment with allied standards. Baryon Fund VC made the investment case for why certification is as much a commercial signal as a compliance exercise. VARDIAN walked our companies through the nuts and bolts of AQAP preparation – process by process.
Ukraine's defence industry has proved it can innovate under fire. The next challenge is building structures, systems, and quality frameworks that open doors to NATO supply chains and allied markets. Until now, this has largely been government territory. We believe accelerators have a responsibility to change that and this workshop is where it starts.
Big thank you to every partner, speaker, and company who showed up and leaned in.
The EU just launched a €160M #DefenceTech programme for Ukraine — €140M in guarantees + €21M in investment grants, designed to unlock up to €400M in bank financing for Ukrainian defence and dual-use companies.
Our President Daria Yaniieva shared her take with @eu_startups on what this programme needs to deliver in practice.
The key point: many Ukrainian defence companies already have battlefield-tested tech, validated solutions, and signed procurement contracts. What’s missing isn’t innovation — it’s the financing to scale production and fulfil existing demand.
What European support should look like according to Daria: working capital facilities, receivables financing, order-backed lending, export credit mechanisms — not venture capital logic, but trade and supply chain finance.
🔗Full piece via link in bio.
Yana Shkhvarovska, Defence Builder Accelerator COO, answered the questions of Цензор.НЕТ as part of their Drone Industry project, covering everything from investment risks and battlefield validation to intellectual property gaps and the closing window of opportunity. A broad, honest, and timely conversation about where Ukrainian defence-tech truly stands right now.
Yana highlighted that defence-tech investment in Ukraine reached $129M in 2024 – up from just $1.1M in 2023. Yet she was frank about the risks: this sector remains a challenging space for investors, particularly in Ukraine. That's precisely the gap Defence Builder is closing making sure our teams are legally sound, battle-validated, and ready for capital long before they ever sit across the table from an investor.
Discussing intellectual property, Yana flagged it as one of the most urgent structural gaps in the sector. As many Ukrainian startups are registering patents abroad simply because domestic legal protection isn't yet strong enough. It's not the ideal path, but it's the rational one, and investors know it. It's something we keep working through directly with every team we bring on.
At Defence Builder Accelerator, we take startups from prototype to a battle-validated, scalable solution – tested and proven with the Armed Forces of Ukraine – and make them attractive to investors. We work across multiple tracks, equipping early-stage teams with the clarity, expertise, resources, and supply chains they need to build and survive in the fastest-moving industry in the world.
Find the full interview at the link in bio ⬆️
"We don't have a startup problem in Ukraine. We have a capital structure problem."
Our President @daryaaay set out what that means at the "Defence and dual-use technologies: venture capital as a tool to power innovation" workshop at the EU–Ukraine Business Summit 2026 in Brussels, convened by the europeancommission on 23 April. She joined the moderated discussion on market needs and investment readiness alongside Benjamin Krahmer, Perry Boyle, and Roman Sulzhyk.
Procurement cycles that once ran 18 to 36 months have compressed to 3 to 6. Ukrainian manufacturers hold signed contracts and clear revenue visibility. What they lack is the working capital to deliver on the orders already on the table.
Grants are doing critical work at the early stage — BRAVE1 alone has deployed over $80M — and will continue to. But grants alone don't scale production lines. The next layer is the one still largely missing: loans, hybrid and convertible instruments, order-backed financing, and insurance tied to real contracts. This is closer to trade finance than to venture capital.
The scale of the opportunity is concrete. Defence Builder Ecosystem's portfolio alone can absorb around $50M in working capital today, returning within 6 to 9 months against confirmed contracts. According to joint market research by Defence Builder, the KSE Institute, and @BRAVE1 , the broader Ukrainian defence tech market stands at $6.8B, against roughly $129M in investment in 2025 — a gap measured in orders of magnitude.
For European financial institutions, four instruments fit this market: working capital facilities, matching loans against confirmed orders, support for joint ventures with Ukrainian companies, and co-investment with local players embedded deeply enough to see performance and battlefield feedback in real time.
The window is the next 12–18 months. Post-war is a different game with different players, and the architecture of European defence financing is being built now — by those who move while the questions are still open.
Thank you to @marketa_rehak and the European Commission for convening the conversation.
Our President @daryaaay joined #Femmegineering by @sigma_software in Gothenburg, where over 100 tech leaders and engineers convened around the questions of resilience and inclusive innovation.
The breakfast, organised by the Sigma team, brought Daria into conversation with Erik Ezelius, Member of the Swedish Parliament and the Defence Committee, and Ellen Rooth-Hornsby, Engagement, Diversity & Inclusion Lead at Saab — three perspectives at one table from a Ukrainian defence tech ecosystem, a Swedish legislator, and an inclusion lead at one of Europe's primes.
Daria's contribution centred on a simple question: what does a quiet night actually cost? For most people, safety is invisible — infrastructure, systems, decisions made years before the crisis arrives. Defence, in her framing, reaches beyond weapons into early warning systems that work, communication that doesn't fail, civilians who are protected. It is about the ability to wake up in the morning without fear — and the ability to wake up at all.
She also brought a data point from Ukraine that rarely makes it into European defence conversations: over the past four years, the share of new female entrepreneurs in Ukraine has grown to 61%. Wartime forced the acceleration. The open question — and the one Daria put to the room — is how that progress is sustained once peace returns.
That thread ran through the morning: resilience cannot be a reaction to crisis. It has to be designed in advance. "You don't build an umbrella in the middle of a storm."
Defence Builder Ecosystem exists to close the distance between frontline need and working technology: thirty-plus portfolio companies, a programme designed with European and Ukrainian expertise, and partnerships across Ukraine and Europe.
Thank you to the Sigma team for the invitation, and to everyone who joined the conversation!
