"If You Wait Until After the War, You're Already Too Late"

Roman Sulzhyk, Founding Partner of Ukrainian investment fund Resist.UA, isn't issuing a polite invitation to investors — he's issuing a warning. His argument: the entrepreneurs who matter have already shown up during the conflict, not after it.

"If you wait until after the war, you're already too late. They recognised the opportunity during the war and came anyway."

Founded in 2023, during Russia's full-scale invasion, Resist.UA sits at the intersection of international capital, military expertise, and battlefield-tested innovation. Its first fund was backed by Ukrainian capital and focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage miltech and defencetech companies, combining investment with hands-on operational support to help prototype-stage teams become scalable businesses.

A Portfolio Built in a War Zone

For operational security reasons, a significant portion of Resist.UA's holdings remains undisclosed. What is public spans a remarkable range of hardware and software:

  • Farsight Vision — AI-powered intelligence software that integrates data from multiple battlefield sensors
  • M-FLY — autonomous drones built for reconnaissance and strike missions
  • Phantom Technology — developer of the Teslia unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), deployed by Ukraine's Defence Forces for frontline logistics and casualty evacuation

In May 2026, Resist.UA completed its first exit: defence manufacturer TAF Industries acquired a majority stake in Phantom Technology to scale industrial production of the Teslia platform. It's a proof-of-concept for the fund's model — mature startups to the point where established manufacturers can take over at scale.

Through its first fund, Resist.UA reviewed more than 600 projects, engaged with over 100 Ukrainian defence-tech teams, and built a portfolio valued at over $10 million.

From Deutsche Bank to a Drone Garage

Sulzhyk's path to Kyiv's defence ecosystem runs through Wall Street. He spent years as a trader at Deutsche Bank during the 2008 financial crisis before pivoting to Ukraine. The shift wasn't purely strategic — it was personal.

While serving on the supervisory board of PrivatBank, he encountered a team trying to wire money abroad to buy drone components. Wartime capital controls had frozen the payment. He went to verify what they were building.

"I walked into a garage and saw around ten people assembling FPV drones by hand. I'd never seen anything like it."

After confirming the team was supplying the military, he pushed to release the payment. That garage, he now believes, was one of the earliest examples of what would become Ukraine's modern defence-tech ecosystem.

The Numbers Behind the Narrative

This isn't just founder mythology. According to research from AVentures Capital, defencetech is the fastest-growing sector in Ukraine's entire tech ecosystem. By end of 2025, the fund recorded more than $129 million in publicly disclosed investments and grants raised by Ukrainian defence startups. Notable rounds included:

  • Swarmer — $15 million
  • Tencore — $3.74 million
  • Dropla — $2.75 million
  • Teletactica — $1.5 million
  • M-FLY — $1.3 million
  • Norda Dynamics — $1 million

One of Resist.UA's limited partners — a manager of multi-billion-dollar funds in Ireland — reportedly compared the current atmosphere to the mid-1990s internet boom.

"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."

Sulzhyk is careful to contextualise: Ukraine may absorb one to two billion dollars, not hundreds of billions. But relative to where the country started, he argues the transformation is comparable in character.

Beyond Capital: Picking the Next Industrial Generation

Sulzhyk's mission has evolved since 2023. He no longer describes himself purely as a fund manager.

"When I started Resist.UA, I thought I was building an investment fund. Today I see it differently. We're helping decide who becomes the next generation of industrial leaders."

That means evaluating founders on values and character as much as technology or business model — a deliberate effort to avoid the oligarchic patterns that followed the Soviet Union's collapse.

Oleksii Komlichenko, who handles fundraising, deal sourcing, government relations, and team development at Resist.UA, brings an executive search background that has proven unexpectedly useful in this context.

"The first step is identifying the right people to invest in. The second is helping them develop."

For both partners, the critical inflection point is when a founder must transition from exceptional engineer to organisational leader — and that's often where Resist.UA spends the most time.

Most of the entrepreneurs they back are in their twenties or early thirties. Sulzhyk believes they will define Ukraine's economic landscape for the next two decades — and that backing them now is about far more than venture returns.