Ukraine Military History Institute
The commander-in-chief started by rejecting his own textbook
The most striking moment in Eveline Buchatskiy's account of how D3 began is not about money. It is about a book.
When the D3 founders went to see General Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, she remembers him taking a book off his shelf, one about traditional war math. His verdict on it was flat. If he followed what was in that book, Ukraine would lose for sure. He did not offer it as a hypothesis. He called it a for sure thing.
Then came the instruction: "your job is to robotize the front line for me." He told her that was the future, that was what he needed, and to go after it.
That sequence matters. The request for robots did not come from a technologist pitching a general. It came from a general who had already concluded that the conventional arithmetic of the war was against him, and who was looking for something that changed the inputs.
The thesis was that Ukraine could not win on the numbers
Buchatskiy states the founding conviction plainly. Ukraine would have to rely on technology because it could not rely on traditional war math. She is careful about how widely that view was held. It was obvious, she says, at least to a few people in Kyiv, that something out of the box was needed.
That hedge is worth keeping. She is not claiming the whole country or the whole command saw it. She is describing a small group that did, and a commander-in-chief who, by her account, had reached the same place from the opposite direction.
The two conclusions met in one room. The founders believed technology was the only way to change the equation. Zaluzhnyi believed the equation, left alone, guaranteed defeat.
D3 came from an investor who did not want a selfie
The origin story is specific. The company she was part of had to reorganise and create new offices. About six months later, around October, Buchatskiy got a call from a previous investor.
A US investor had come to Kyiv for the YES conference. According to the call, he did not want to be another visitor who comes for a selfie with Zelensky and goes home. He wanted a big impact and was willing to put a large check into something meaningful toward Ukraine's victory.
So a small think tank formed to work out the best use of the money. The answer was D3, an early-stage venture capital firm. They presented it to the investor, whom she describes as coming from the big tech world. He loved it, and said he was ready to launch.
Defence venture in Ukraine was fringe, and she says so
Buchatskiy is emphatic that the idea sounds mainstream now and was nothing of the kind then. Back then, she says, it was absolutely fringe, absolutely not popular, and you could even call it crazy.
Her evidence is from inside the investor world. She was part of Signal groups of investors in Western Europe and the US, and they were still talking about Afghanistan and Iraq. She found that shocking. There was a war in their backyard, and the conversation was elsewhere.
Her phrase for the general attitude is that no investors were touching Ukraine with a six-feet pole.
The company she came from explains the conviction
Her account starts with the company she was part of, and it is relevant to why she thought a technology bet was credible. Out of 1,050 people, about 850 were in Kyiv, on four floors of the Parus Business Center. The entire R&D, support, several other functions and the back office were there. Boston, the other location, was a handful of people.
The company was airSlate, which does workflow automation, and she calls it one of the most successful SaaS tech companies out of Ukraine. That background reads as the quiet premise of the whole story. Someone who had watched a Kyiv engineering team build a successful global software company was in a position to believe that Ukrainian engineers could build what Zaluzhnyi was asking for.
Three years later, the landscape has flipped
She ends by marking how much has changed. Several funds have since launched with a mandate to engage exactly with the technologies that are useful in Ukraine. It is, in her words, a completely different scenario.
The distance between those two moments is the real finding. In roughly three years, the idea that a commander-in-chief had to request, and that Western investors would not touch, became a category with multiple dedicated funds. The general's instruction came first. The capital followed.
What to watch
- The count of Ukraine-focused defence funds. Buchatskiy says several now exist with that mandate. Whether that number keeps growing, or consolidates, shows whether the shift she describes holds.
- How much of the front is actually robotized. Zaluzhnyi's instruction is a measurable target. The share of front-line tasks handed to unmanned systems is the test of whether it was met.
- Whether Western investor attention stays on Ukraine. Her complaint was that investors talked about Afghanistan and Iraq instead. Whether that attention holds as the novelty fades is checkable over the next year.