The Ukrainian-American investment group MITS Capital invested $3.74 million in TerMIT ground drone manufacturer Tencore, which became the 11th company to join the investment group’s portfolio.
Tencore, a Ukraine-based developer of the multi-mission unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) platform TerMIT, signed the deal with MITS Capital during the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC2025) in Rome on Friday, the press release says.
“Our goal is to get Russia out of Ukraine and Ukraine into NATO’s defense supply chain,” the press release quoted Perry Boyle, CEO & Founding Partner at MITS Capital.This is another deal secured by the rapidly growing MITS Capital LLC, an investment group based in Kyiv and New York that was founded just last year and is focused on funding Ukrainian defense innovations. MITS Capital includes the MITS Accelerator, MITS Lightning Fund, and an investment advisory unit, “with a mission to bring global capital into Ukraine’s defense industrial base”, the press release says.
The overall level of the fund’s investments has led to Ernst & Young to call it the largest international investor in Ukraine’s DefenseTech ecosystem in its report on the sector.
Tencore, Ukrainian developer and supplier of combat-proven robotic platforms, became the 11th company – its TerMIT drone is NATO-standardized and battle-tested that is actively deployed to Ukraine’s front lines.
The company has already produced over 800 units and intends to boost production to 2,000 by the end of the year, according to the press release. The newly secured capital will be used to scale both R&D and manufacturing capacities.
The legal precedent for defense tech investments in Ukraine
The investment deal between MITS Capital and Tencore became the first Diia.City contract between a US investor and a Ukrainian DefenseTech company, marking a precedent for such investments from foreign funds with its legal structuring.
The investment was structured through Ukraine’s Diia.City legal platform, a special legal and tax framework tailored for the technology sector that includes over 2,000 companies registered as resident in Ukraine.
Previously, foreign companies preferred not to invest directly in Ukrainian tech companies, but MITS Capital found a legal way to fix it. “This agreement creates a clear legal path for international investors to deploy capital directly into Ukrainian entities without workarounds,” the press release quoted Denys Gurak, CIO & Founding Partner at MITS Capital.
The fund used Article 29 of Ukraine’s Law “On Stimulating the Development of the Digital Economy» (also known as the “Diia City law”) to create the legal basis for convertible loan agreements, common for early-stage startup financing in Silicon Valley. Previously, such an agreement was not used with Ukrainian LLCs (the so-called TOVs), but MITS managed to design the first disclosed precedent deal with Ukraine’s legal entities.