Ukrainian drone maker Vyriy Industries has raised UAH 1bn from more than 24,000 investors in 20 days of selling corporate bonds, according to the Inzhur MilTech fund’s website. The fund acts as an intermediary selling access to the company’s bonds.
The manufacturer is currently planning to raise UAH 2bn, Vyriy CEO Oleksiy Babenko has said. If necessary, the amount could be revised up to UAH 4bn.
- Access to Vyriy Industries bonds opened in early August. Vyriy became the first Ukrainian deftech company to raise money in this way.
- The placement is closed, so private investors cannot buy the bonds directly: they purchase certificates of the Inzhur MilTech fund from UAH 1,000, and the fund converts these funds into bonds with an annual yield of 25–29%. Sales will run until 31 December 2026.
- As the company explained, bonds for ordinary buyers are available only on the Inzhur platform. Large private investors can buy the bonds directly, but still with Inzhur acting as broker.
- In the first 24 hours of sales, Ukrainians invested more than UAH 500m, with the average investment amounting to UAH 40,819.
- On 7 July 2026, the State Bureau of Investigation carried out searches of the company’s CEO Oleksiy Babenko and his relatives — investigative actions took place at more than 40 locations. Investigators are examining the theory that company officials may have artificially inflated the cost of drones.
- According to preliminary SBI data, during 2025 the company supplied drones under government contracts worth almost UAH 7bn. Investigators also said they had identified more than 150 sole proprietors who may have been used in the scheme.
- The company said it is co-operating with law enforcement agencies and did not rule out that the simultaneous emergence of an information campaign in anonymous Telegram channels and the investigative actions could be an attempt to discredit it.
- On 23 July, a court refused the SBI’s request to seize the UAH 32m that had been confiscated, finding that the funds were not connected to the criminal proceedings — the money was returned to the company and had been intended for employees’ wages, Babenko said.
He later said he believed these actions could have affected investment from abroad into Ukraine.
"The biggest consequences are what did not happen and now will not happen. This definitely scared off a large number of investors who wanted to invest in Ukraine, as well as a large number of Ukrainian businesses that perhaps wanted to pivot into miltech," Babenko said recently in a comment to NV.