Resist.UA’s Wartime Bet on Ukraine’s Defense Tech Just Paid Off

Ukrainian venture fund Resist.UA logged its first exit in May 2026, when defense manufacturer TAF Industries bought a majority stake in Phantom Technology, maker of the Teslia unmanned ground vehicle. It is the clearest sign yet that money placed into Ukraine’s defense startups during the darkest months of the war is starting to come back.

Roman Sulzhyk, founding partner of Resist.UA, built the fund on a blunt bet. “If you wait until after the war, you’re already too late,” he said. The founders worth backing, he argues, “recognised the opportunity during the war and came anyway.” Founded in 2023, Resist.UA has since built a portfolio worth more than $10 million spanning battlefield software, autonomous drones and ground robots, and it just watched one of those bets get bought out by an industrial buyer.

A Bet Placed from a Frozen Wire Transfer

Sulzhyk spent two decades in banking before the war, trading for JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank in New York and London. He says JP Morgan still runs a grid computing system he patented while he was there. When Russia’s full scale invasion began in February 2022, he was serving on the supervisory board of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank.

One engineering team he knew needed to wire money abroad to buy components. Wartime capital controls had frozen the payment, so he went to see what they were actually building.

“I walked into a garage and saw around ten people assembling FPV, or first person view, drones by hand,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like it.”

He confirmed the team really was supplying the military and pushed for the payment to be released. That garage, he says, was one of the first seeds of what became Ukraine’s defense tech sector. By 2023, hundreds of founders were building military technology, and Sulzhyk turned from individual favors to a fund. “This is the first time in Ukraine’s 30 year history that we’ve had dedicated, professional investment capital focused on startups,” he said. Much of this account comes from an interview at Kyiv’s Defencetech Startup Week, organized by the European Defense Tech Hub, where multiple investors described the moment as a founders’ market.

Phantom Technology’s Exit Puts the Model to the Test

Resist.UA runs as a hybrid of venture capital and private equity, weighted toward long term company growth and manufacturing capacity rather than quick returns. During the war it pays no dividends. Nearly everything it recovers goes back into scaling portfolio companies and the wider sector around them, a reinvestment first approach the fund treats as a core principle.

The first fund reviewed more than 600 projects and engaged over 100 Ukrainian defense tech teams before making seven investments, according to the fund. Resist.UA is now raising a second fund worth 50 million euros, roughly $54 million at current exchange rates, and has already closed two follow on rounds for companies from the first fund, some of it routed through a special purpose vehicle.

Two of its known bets are public. Farsight Vision builds AI powered intelligence software that pulls together data from multiple battlefield sensors. M-Fly makes autonomous drones for reconnaissance and strike missions. A significant share of the rest of the portfolio stays confidential, Sulzhyk says, for operational security, which is part of what makes covering this corner of venture capital unlike covering most startup investing.

Other Ukrainian battlefield technologies are drawing similar attention right now, including a laser weapon that burns Russian drones from the sky.

In May 2026, Resist.UA’s model produced its first exit. TAF Industries, a defense manufacturer, bought a majority stake in Phantom Technology, developer of the Teslia unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) used by Ukraine’s Defence Forces for frontline logistics and casualty evacuation. It is the kind of deal Sulzhyk says the fund exists to produce: an established manufacturer taking over industrial scale production once a startup has proven itself under fire.

One of his limited partners, who oversees multibillion dollar funds in Ireland, told Sulzhyk the moment reminds him of something else entirely.

He said it feels like 1996 or 1997, the beginning of the internet boom. He never expected to see that kind of opportunity in Europe, let alone in Ukraine.

“Obviously, the numbers are much smaller,” Sulzhyk said. “Ukraine may ultimately absorb one or two billion dollars rather than the hundreds of billions invested during the internet revolution. But relative to where Ukraine started, it’s equally transformational.”

Ukraine’s Fastest-Growing Investment Sector, by the Numbers

Globally, venture investors are asking nearly every founder the same question right now: why is this the moment. That calculus is playing out at enormous scale across H1 2026’s $510 billion startup funding wave, and Ukraine’s defense tech corner of it is growing faster than almost any other.

Ukrainian defense startups pulled in more than $129 million in investments and grants during 2025, according to investment firm AVentures Capital, a 19 fold jump in two years. The average deal size grew fivefold to $2.1 million even as the total number of deals slipped slightly, a sign of a market maturing rather than simply widening. Foreign investors supplied 49% of that capital, with another 25% coming from deals blending international and Ukrainian money, the first time since 2021 that outside capital has outweighed local funds.

Not every tracker counts the same way.

• AVentures Capital counts $129 million in disclosed 2025 investments and grants, up 19 fold in two years.
• Brave1, the government’s own cluster, counts a narrower $105 million using only publicly disclosed deals and its own grants.
• PitchBook counts disclosed equity climbing to $57.2 million in 2025 before it eased to $18 million through the first half of 2026.

Some of those 2025 rounds now have names attached.

Swarmer’s shares jumped as much as 700% on their opening day of trading before settling around 48% above the IPO price weeks later. Ukraine also produced its first dedicated defense unicorn in March 2026, when UForce, maker of the Magura sea drones, raised $50 million at a valuation above $1 billion.

Sulzhyk puts the whole sector’s current value at roughly $1 billion to $2 billion. If Ukraine can export $2 billion to $5 billion worth of systems annually after the war, mostly to Europe during its rearmament push, he thinks that figure could grow to $5 billion to $10 billion.

Who Else Is Chasing Ukraine’s Defense Founders?

A widening circle of foreign and Ukrainian funds is now competing for access to the same founders Resist.UA meets first. Green Flag Ventures, Horizon Capital, the International Finance Corporation and American names like D3 and Andreessen Horowitz have all backed Ukrainian defense startups, mostly through scouts, satellite offices or regular visits rather than full time teams on the ground.

Green Flag Ventures operates out of Los Angeles and Kyiv and has backed HIMERA and Swarmer. Horizon Capital, though Ukrainian founded, draws support from more than 40 international institutional investors and has kept its Kyiv headquarters open through the war while raising its Catalyst Fund for reconstruction. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group’s private sector arm, has expanded its own exposure through that same Catalyst Fund. Further down the list are D3, whose backers reportedly include former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, along with Radius Capital, Scout Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, active mostly through venture scouts rather than permanent Kyiv offices.

Investor attention isn’t limited to weapons platforms either. Ukraine’s medical technology corner has produced its own draw, including a team that built a battlefield medicine startup from scratch.

Sulzhyk has watched the crowd grow from the inside. Brave1, a government run portal connecting founders with military testers and investors, held its first investor demo day with five companies and three investors, he says. Its most recent gathering drew around a thousand companies and dozens of international investors. The state’s flagship event has scaled just as fast. Last year’s Defense Tech Valley summit in Lviv drew more than 5,000 participants and $100 million in investment, and organizers are billing the September 2026 edition as the year of global scaling.

Still, Sulzhyk argues Resist.UA holds an edge scouting trips can’t match. “We’re much closer to the ecosystem,” he said. “We meet founders before they’ve learned how to raise venture capital, and by the time many international investors discover a company, we’ve often known the founders for a year or two. That’s incredibly valuable.”

The Founders Nobody Has Discovered Yet

Sulzhyk thinks of Ukraine’s defense tech pool as a pyramid, and Resist.UA spends most of its time in the middle.

• Top tier – founders who already speak English, pitch well and know how Western venture capital works. Sulzhyk estimates only around 150 to 200 Ukrainian defense startups have received this kind of structured investment at all.
• Middle tier – engineers with real military customers and strong frontline reputations who have never pitched an investor, and sometimes don’t speak English. This is the group Resist.UA says it exists to reach.
• Bottom tier – companies sustained entirely by government procurement contracts, with no obvious need to ever raise outside capital.

That middle group is where Oleksii Komlichenko, who leads fundraising, deal sourcing and government relations at Resist.UA, spends most of his time. His background is in executive search, not investing. “The first step is identifying the right people to invest in. The second is helping them develop,” he said.

“Successful founders eventually have to transition from being outstanding engineers into people capable of building organisations, attracting talent and leading teams,” Komlichenko said. “That’s often where we spend the most time helping.”

That support sometimes goes well beyond a term sheet. Sulzhyk recalls one portfolio company negotiating a partnership in Sweden that asked his partner outright, “Can you effectively become our CEO for a while and help us do this?” They understood the technology perfectly. What they lacked was experience negotiating with international partners.

A Drone Maker’s Raid Tests Foreign Investors’ Nerves

Not every recent headline out of Ukraine’s defense tech sector has been about growth. Earlier this month, law enforcement searched the offices of Vyriy Industries, one of Ukraine’s largest FPV drone makers. An industry association representing Ukrainian defense manufacturers, NAUDI, called the company one of the pioneers of the country’s FPV drone market, one that supplies up to 25% of the Defence Forces’ FPV drones.

“Several foreign investors have already written to me with questions about the situation,” Sulzhyk said. He argues the state should act on real violations, but that enforcement needs to be systemic and consistently communicated rather than look selective, since corruption headlines hand Russia an easy information war talking point and spook the same investors he’s trying to attract.

Money moving the other direction faces its own friction. U.S. export control rules can take four months to obtain licenses for American built technology drawn from Ukrainian battlefield data, according to Airlogix, a joint venture partner with U.S. German firm Auterion. “We iterate with a pace of weeks, not months,” said Mykola Mazur, Airlogix’s chief technology officer.

Ukraine’s own legal toolkit still has gaps too. The country lacks standard instruments like SAFEs (simple agreements for future equity) or convertible notes that Western investors expect, which has pushed some founders to register companies abroad instead. Legislation planned for 2025 and 2026 aims to close that gap, letting more startups raise money as Ukrainian legal entities rather than foreign ones.

Kyiv Is Betting on a Flight It Can’t Book Yet

Sulzhyk is already looking past the war. “The day commercial flights resume, you won’t be able to book a hotel room,” he said.

He tells investors relationships matter more right now than capital alone. “We’re not simply raising capital. We’re building long term relationships,” he said. “If you’re already part of our network, we’ll help you understand how Ukraine works. After the war, there simply won’t be enough time to build those relationships from scratch.”

For now, Resist.UA counts one exit, a second fund still being raised, and a queue of founders in Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv it hasn’t gotten to yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Resist.UA?

Resist.UA is a Ukrainian venture fund founded in 2023 that invests in early stage defense tech and dual use startups, combining venture capital with private equity style support for manufacturing growth. Its first fund built a $10 million portfolio across seven investments, and it is now raising a second fund of 50 million euros.

Who Is Roman Sulzhyk?

Roman Sulzhyk is the founding partner of Resist.UA. Before the war he traded for JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank and served on the supervisory board of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank, from 2019 to 2022.

What Happened with Resist.UA’s First Exit?

In May 2026, defense manufacturer TAF Industries bought a majority stake in Phantom Technology, developer of the Teslia unmanned ground vehicle used for frontline logistics and casualty evacuation. It is Resist.UA’s first exit since launching in 2023.

How Much Money Has Flowed into Ukraine’s Defense Tech Sector?

Estimates vary by tracker. AVentures Capital counts $129 million in disclosed 2025 investments and grants, Brave1’s own tally puts it at $105 million, and PitchBook’s narrower disclosed equity measure puts 2025 at $57.2 million.

What Is Brave1?

Brave1 is the Ukrainian government’s coordination platform for the defense tech sector. It runs grants, accelerators and investor demo days, and connects startups with the Ministry of Defence for battlefield testing.

Is It Risky to Invest in Ukrainian Defense Startups?

Yes. Investors face wartime physical risk to manufacturing sites, a legal system still missing standard instruments like SAFEs, U.S. export control delays of up to four months, and reputational risk from headlines like the recent law enforcement search of drone maker Vyriy Industries.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Venture investing in wartime defense technology carries significant financial, legal and physical risk, including illiquidity and possible total loss of capital. Consult a licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions. Figures are accurate as of publication on July 16, 2026.