Ukraine defence investment tour in UK “oversubscribed”

Ukraine’s defence-tech accelerator – Brave1 – held a three-day investment tour across the UK, which was “oversubscribed” with investors, as Kyiv seeks to drive investment in its domestic industry.  

Along with drumming up investment in Ukraine’s defence industry, the tour aimed to assess the possibility of establishing joint ventures with UK companies. 

The tour included a dedicated defence investment showcase on 2 June in the City of London that hosted more than “200 UK investors”, Artem Moroz, Brave1’s Head of Investor Relations, told DSEI Gateway and other media at a press conference in Ukraine’s embassy in London. 

The showcase event was “very busy”, the CEO of one Ukrainian startup commented, with “hundreds more” investors unable to attend due to capacity constraints.  

This exemplifies a “clear appetite” among UK private finance to invest in Ukraine’s burgeoning industry, Moroz said. 

Of the 17 Ukrainian companies that embarked on the tour, 10 pitched their technologies to UK investors as part of the showcase event. 

The 10 companies were: 

• AIDronesUA 
• Aero Center 
• Himera 
• Huless 
• General Cherry 
• Offset Labs 
• Pai Defence 
• Ratel Robotics 
• Soloma Avionics 
• Trypillian 

The group of companies largely focuses on drone technology, command systems, autonomy, signal intelligence, and AI in data analytics. 

This means that the UK is missing out on opportunities to “grow with Ukraine”, the CEO of a Ukrainian tech startup participating in the tour explained. 

In an interview with DSEI Gateway last month, Moroz highlighted this as a motivation for holding the UK tour, following a successful US roadshow. 

Significant blockers remain 

Despite the UK’s strong commitment to Ukraine on a government-to-government level, the country is “hard to crack” when it comes to private partnership and attracting investment, one attendee said. 

A key blocker mentioned by attending Ukrainian companies is the amount of regulation surrounding investments in the UK, making it hard for Ukraine’s companies to pitch. 

Partially, this is because much of Ukraine’s growing defence industry is less than three years old and cannot demonstrate lengthy financial history or evidence of corporate governance. 

Besides this issue, one senior Ukrainian company representative said that “the Ministry of Defence and the City [of London financial district] don’t know how to talk to each other” to garner SME investment, let alone investment in Ukraine’s SMEs. 

This, as one CEO put it, is because the UK MoD primarily works with primes, rather than leveraging smaller companies as direct vehicles of innovation.