Defence Builder participated in the University Defense Tech Forum, held as part of Kyiv Defense Tech Week, serving as both a mentor and a jury member in a pitch competition for university-based defence tech teams. Andrii Hryshchuk, Defence Builder's Investment Manager & Tech Scout, conducted a workshop for participating teams and evaluated 13 defence-oriented software projects presented by universities from Ukraine and Europe.

Ahead of the pitch session, Hryshchuk ran a hands-on workshop for student founders — covering what defence investors look for, how to frame a technical solution as a strategic asset, and what separates a compelling pitch from a demo.

Thirteen teams then presented defence-oriented software solutions. The jury selected three winners:

1st place — University of Liverpool. Drone detection and identification system using mmWave MIMO radars.

2nd place — Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, NAS of Ukraine. Software replicating a combat radar interface to reduce dependence on physical radar systems during training.

3rd place — Technical University of Munich. A data processing layer for multi-domain drone systems that reduces operator cognitive load by aggregating analytics and routing them to a Battlefield Management System.

The range of solutions — from signal processing to battlefield UX — reflects a broader shift: universities are becoming a serious node in the defence innovation ecosystem. Ukraine, as one of the most active real-world environments for rapid defence technology development and deployment, offers a unique context for that academic-defence link. But the value scales only when the right connections are made — between battlefield-tested innovation and academic research, between defence companies with R&D needs and university teams with the capacity to meet them, between Ukrainian institutions and global partners.

"Universities are producing teams that think in battlefield terms — not just academic ones. The quality across all 13 pitches showed that the academic-defence pipeline is real, and it is accelerating," said Andrii Hryshchuk, Investment Manager & Tech Scout at Defence Builder.

The forum was organized in partnership with European Defense Tech Hub, Kyiv School of Economics — Defence Builder's co-founder and the hosting institution — the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, and Brave1.