The Ukrainian government created Brave1 in 2023 to foster a defence tech ecosystem in the wake of the Russian invasion. The idea was simple: bring together experts from startups and elsewhere to put together prototypes to use in Ukraine’s defence within weeks of conception.
But two years on, Brave1 has become something else.
“It is funny, isn’t it, that Western companies now schedule meetings with Western companies at the sidelines of a Ukrainian event?” remarked one U.S. startup employee to Resilience Media at a football stadium earlier this week.
Yes, that’s right. Brave1’s Defence Tech Valley conference happened at a stadium. No other location could simultaneously harbour an audience for panel discussions, racing grounds for unmanned ground vehicles, and just enough free space for a TLK-1000. Ranging 12 meters in length and capable of carrying a 5,000-kg warhead, this unmanned underwater vehicle has yet to be used in an active strike. But the startup believes this product will resonate beyond the Black Sea that borders the country. Allied countries in Asia Pacific will be a key target.
Beyond Toloka, the company behind the TLK-1000, defence technology has emerged as the backbone of Ukraine’s relations with the world, a topic that loomed large over the conference. Happening in Lviv, far closer to EU’s border than the usual Kyiv venues, many first-comers to Ukraine were welcomed at the event.
After the event concluded, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for “digital transformation” who is also the country’s First Deputy Prime Minister, spelled out the event in numbers.
There were 5,000 participants and 1,500 foreign guests from more than 50 countries, he said, with over $100 million committed during the event to defence tech startups out of the country. Those commitments were primarily made by way of foreign money: NUNC Capital out of the Netherlands said it would invest €20 million into Ukrainian startups; Germany’s Verne Capital Fund announced €25 million; Varangians Fund from Sweden said it would launch a “large-scale investment plan” and has made its first deal (unannounced); the launch of a new fund called Oedipus; and the startup Swarmer raising $15 million.
Such a massive presence of foreigners seeking learnings from the “Ukrainian experience” was not always the case.
“It is not a secret that in 2022, Western companies just dropped off their products at the Ukrainian border,” recalled Clayton Williams, the managing director of IQT International, the US American venture capital firm that has its roots affiliated with the CIA. Only a few years ago, he said, the feedback loop simply did not exist.
No wonder that some of the technology did not live up to the expectations.
“In 2022, when Shield AI first came to Ukraine, we failed,” said James Lythgoe, the company’s Ukraine managing director.
Shield AI could have decided to “join the graveyard of other technologies that failed and walk away,” he added, but instead chose a different path and invested eight months of iterations until its reconnaissance UAV MQ-35 V-BAT would become fit for purpose.
Now, Lythgoe disclosed, Shield AI is working with 45 units within the Ukrainian army.
Not every company has followed this curve.
“Some of the producers do not listen to the feedback we give them,” said Viktor, a serviceman of the Third Assault Corps responsible for testing of new unmanned ground vehicles. “Sadly, very often we tell the producer that their UGV is shit and will simply not be able even to drive all the way to the frontline.”
Viktor called upon the producers to “stop imagining things, stop coming up with some hypothesis on your own, come and ask us.”
He is direct in his remarks, not least because he knows what predated the hype around Ukrainian defence technologies.
“We all must understand that this experience was not given to us for free, this experience was made on blood, real heroes have given their lives for it, thus it is priceless,” Viktor concludes.
Seated next to him is Batuhan Yumurtacı, the founder of Tytan Technologies. The German startup is working on a drone interceptor and has participated in Test in Ukraine program.
He agreed that the feedback sometimes is “very ruthless.”
“You go in with your product, your baby, and they tell you it is a piece of crap and ask you what they are supposed to do with that,” he said. But if the effort is made to iterate on the feedback, the results change. There are other positive spillover effects out of this process, he said. “You build the company and the product development culture around this experience; you are getting used to delivering those updates frequently.”
At the same time, the front line does not wait for the producer to catch up. Even for Tytan, a startup with speed and little red tape, it is difficult to keep up with the pace dictated by the users.
“We are now delivering biweekly updates on our hardware and software, but it is still not enough,” noted Yumurtacı.
Stark, another German startup working on loitering munitions (which has recently closed a large round of funding to fuel its growth as a business), also iterates on the feedback it receives in Ukraine, although the testing is conducted by direct agreement with the unit, outside of the Test in Ukraine initiative.
At Stark’s conference booth, Maksym Cherkis, the head of startup’s Ukraine office, was surrounded by a deep circle of Ukrainian servicemen, answering a question after question.
Speaking to Resilience Media, he cautioned to take this rampant interest with a pinch of salt. For the past 11 years of the war, there was not a single day when the Ukrainian army was satisfied with its stocks. Thus, the military is always on the look-out, but such conversations do not necessarily lead to procurement.
At the same time, the feedback from the military is central to Starks’s model. In less than a year, the UAV has already undergone 4 revisions after conducting its first tests in Ukraine.
In other realms of war, even such that frequency of iteration is not enough. The Fourth Law, a Ukrainian company producing terminal navigation modules for FPVs, is updating its software a couple times a week, said Yaroslav Azhnyuk.
And yet, focusing too much on technical details is a false path.
“For all of the bluster, for all of the investments into these amazing AI companies, how much are we actually seeing these companies making an impact on the battlefield?” Azhnyuk asked. The fact is that while Brave1’s event was happening In Lviv, the frontline has been moving towards the city, slowly but steadily.
Attempting to solve this problem, The Fourth Law’s founder called upon companies to refocus their attention on more practical matters by answering a question: ‘how do we scale this product from being used by hundreds of soldiers to being used by hundreds of thousands of soldiers?’
There is little in common between Fourth Law and the Turkish prime Baykar Makina, which back in 2018 supplied Ukrainian Armed Force’s with their first attack drones.
Nonetheless, the appeal the CEO of the Turkish company Haluk Bayraktar has made was strikingly similar to Azhnyuk’s concern.
“Yes, there are great innovations that Ukrainian companies are doing, but these innovations do not turn into mass production,” he said. Currently, he believes, it is impossible to preserve the know-hows in secrecy and thus the innovation by itself is not decisive.
“The differentiating factor is the mass scale manufacturing. We don’t need highly sophisticated fragile technology, but a technology that is working properly, easy to use, and is in mass scale,” Bayraktar argued during his speech at the conference.
That is why Europe seeks to support the scaling of Ukrainian defence industry, as exemplified by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent announcement of 6 billion EUR investment into the production of drones in Ukraine.
Similar programs have been announced at the conference, too, although far smaller in volume. For instance, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment launched a partnership with Brave1 called Brave Norway. This project will include a fund to “accelerate innovation for relevant industries in both Ukraine and Norway,” the countries said, as well as hackathons and joint R&D efforts. The ultimate goal of the program is to “enable transition from good ideas to scalable solutions providing operational effect.”
Other programs are still in progress. Martin Jõesaar, the Program Officer of EU Defence Innovation Office in Kyiv, said during the conference that the Ukraine Support Instrument, one of several financing initiatives suggested to support Ukraine’s defence efforts, is still being finalised by the European Parliament. The program seeks to increase the European procurement of Ukrainian defence products and may have a budget of as much as €300 million. However, the EU’s Commissioner for Defence and Space, Andrius Kubilius, noted at the conference that the military support from the EU to Ukraine was at €20 billion per year, or 0.1% of the EU’s GDP.
“We can do more,” he said at the event.
But will they? Will these efforts have the impact on the battlefield, the one Azhnyuk was referring to? This remains to be seen. At the same time, to most at the conference, it was clear that this war will not be the last for the Europeans of the current century.
