The Defence Builder Ukrainian Defence Tech Delegation held a closed-door working lunch organised and hosted by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
All seven delegation companies — General Cherry, Sine Engineering, TOLOKA, Tencore, MaXon Systems, Huless, and Trinity Robotics — presented their 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.
Artem Petrenko, President of Sigma Software Group — one of Defence Builder's co-founding organisations — opened the session with key findings from the joint market study by Defence Builder, KSE Institute, and Brave1. The headline: Ukraine's defence tech market reached $6.8 billion in 2025, with UAVs accounting for $6.3 billion (137% YoY growth), ground robotics reaching $252 million (488% growth), and electronic warfare at $220 million (215% growth). Against that market, only $129 million in capital has been deployed — a gap that defines the investment opportunity.
The open discussion that followed covered five areas: how to structure Swedish-Ukrainian joint ventures and co-production, how Ukrainian companies can enter EU defence procurement pathways including the EU Drone Deal, where capital should go in a market where technology has outpaced investment, how to build IP-sharing and technology transfer frameworks between Ukrainian and Nordic partners, and what certification is needed to move battlefield-proven systems into NATO and EU supply chains.
The session's framing — delivered by Petrenko and carried through the discussion — centred on three structural arguments.
First, iteration speed. Ukrainian companies don't optimise quarterly — they optimise after every failed mission. That is the single structural advantage Western primes cannot replicate in peacetime, regardless of R&D budget. What is actually being built is autonomous navigation, anti-jam communications, swarm coordination, and a doctrine of attritable systems the entire Western defence world is now trying to understand.
Second, joint ventures over acquisitions. The key asset is not hardware — it is the engineers, the frontline feedback loops, and the next generation of IP that hasn't been written yet. A drone acquired without continuous Ukrainian iteration behind it may be obsolete in six months. The half-life of a platform is months. The half-life of the team is much longer. More than ten JVs have already launched across Europe — creating local manufacturing, retaining Ukrainian IP, deploying Western capital, and building shared resilience.
Third, the shift from recipient to strategic supplier. For many allies, Ukraine is now the country that answers the question: how do we stop drones at scale, and how do we do it cheaply enough to actually field at volume? Three years ago that question went to primes in the US and Europe. Today it goes to Kyiv.
The session at SITE was the second stop of the delegation's Swedish programme. On May 6–7, the same seven companies demonstrated their systems to 200+ defence professionals at UAS Forum Sweden in Västervik and held working meetings with senior Swedish Armed Forces command, FMV officials, NATO representatives, and allied partner delegations. The Stockholm lunch shifted the format — from broad exhibition to a focused, high-level working conversation with the people who deploy capital, shape procurement, and structure industrial partnerships.
Sweden is one of Ukraine's most committed defence partners — total military aid has exceeded €9.6 billion as of early 2026, with €4 billion in comprehensive support planned for the year. That commitment creates a natural framework for industrial cooperation, and sessions like the one at SITE are where that cooperation takes concrete shape.
