читати українською

The founder of Pravo Ventures isn't just building a venture firm. He's building the trust architecture between the West and Ukraine — one investor at a time.
While most venture firms are still debating Ukraine on conference panels, Pravo Ventures has already closed deals. The firm specializes in syndicated SPV investments in Ukrainian defense and technology startups, with entry points starting at $1,000 — a threshold deliberately low to make the first step into this market as accessible as possible. The mission is simple and revolutionary at once: bring Western investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders into supporting Ukraine not from a position of charity, but from one of genuine partnership, with real skin in the game.
Pravo Ventures didn't emerge from an abundance of capital — it emerged from an abundance of conviction. Founder and Geopolitical Lead Hans Braunfisch spent years at large firms analyzing Ukrainian investment pathways, conducted over 50 conversations with institutional investors, and received 50 rejections. Rather than crafting a better pitch, he reframed the problem entirely: lower the activation energy for those who already cared. The firm's first SPV, Aerobavovna, closed oversubscribed by more than 50%. The second followed with the same result.
A Vanderbilt graduate and former COO of startup Rayka, Hans Braunfisch has become one of the most consistent voices making the Ukraine-as-investment-thesis case to Western audiences. His partner Vlad handles the technology and battlefield intelligence layer — an OSINT practitioner with deep command of defense systems. Together, they have built what Braunfisch calls a genuine competitive moat: not deal flow, but intelligence.

Hans, you spent years at large firms researching Ukrainian investment pathways and have had over 50 conversations with individual and institutional investors who all said no. Walk us through the moment you realized the solution wasn't a better pitch to institutions, it was building an entirely new access mechanism for individual investors.
It was a long process and it tested patience, but knowing what Ukrainians go through every day, this pales in comparison. The shift came out of very frank conversations with individual investors. They were trying to calculate the same risk-adjusted return for a Ukrainian opportunity that they would for a US or UK startup. That math doesn't hold. Ukraine has real headwinds that need to be priced in, but it's also a uniquely structured labor market and operating environment with extraordinary postwar growth potential. Apples to apples doesn't work.
Once I saw that, the problem reframed. What we needed to do was lower the activation energy for people who already cared. We needed to give investors who are passionate about Ukraine a way to get involved with as little as $1,000. Once they're in, they see the viability of the market firsthand, they meet the founders, and they typically come back to write a larger check on the next deal.
The compounding effect goes well beyond the next check. Once someone has skin in the game, the rest of their behavior shifts. The next time Ukraine is in the news, they read it differently. At the ballot box, they pay closer attention to which candidates on both sides have been serious about supporting democracy abroad. For our LPs who run businesses, when a supplier decision comes across their desk and one option is Ukrainian, they're predisposed to lean in. That's the calculus we're trying to change. Make the first step easy, and a lot of other things follow.
You co-founded Rayka as COO during your Vanderbilt years. What specific lessons from that experience shaped how you built Pravo Ventures, and what did you learn about when to shut something down versus when to persist?
Rayka was a real zero-to-one education. I learned how to take an idea to market and how to work with specialists across very different skill sets to get there. The biggest operating lesson was finding the right balance between holding a clear ultimate goal and staying nimble enough to pivot on how you reach it.
Where Rayka fell short, in hindsight, was the lodestar. We didn't have a singular driving purpose that everyone could orient around when the road got hard. That's the contrast with Pravo. At Pravo, we are driving from genuine conviction and a defined larger goal: getting Westerners, Western investors, and influential people in their communities involved in supporting Ukraine directly, with skin in the game, building up the subnational diplomatic ties between our countries one investor at a time.
That clarity changes how you handle the twists and turns. We can pivot on tactics. We can change how we describe a product, restructure an approach, refine the way we talk about a thesis. None of that requires an apology, because the mission underneath it doesn't move. That's the discipline I took from Rayka into Pravo. Be flexible about the path but uncompromising about the destination.

You launched Pravo on under $200,000. What was the most important capability you couldn't afford to build in year one, and did that constraint ultimately make the platform better or worse?
I'm a firm believer that you don't risk other people's capital just to be able to say you raised more money. We were fortunate to have a group of backers who believed in us as individuals and professionals, who understood the scale of the opportunity Ukraine offers the West, and who understood why American and Western investors should be among the first to be there and to stay there. That alignment let us be disciplined from day one.
A point of pride for us: we returned roughly half of the original capital our backers committed. We would rather they redeploy that capital directly into Ukrainian entrepreneurs than have it sit at the management company. In parallel, we have built a highly capital-efficient model to run the firm, which means we don't need to absorb that risk.
The capability we couldn't afford in year one, and that I'm now genuinely glad we never built, was a custom backend for the funding mechanism itself. To do that properly, you need a lot of moving parts working in concert and fully by the book on holding, accepting, and processing capital under the relevant regulations. We seriously considered spending significant money to build it ourselves.Instead, we found a better equilibrium. With the right AI tooling and the right external vendors, we run an intuitive, well-designed front end and route the actual fundraising through approachable, streamlined, compliant infrastructure on the back end. The result is more capital reaching our Ukrainian portfolio companies and more upside preserved for the Western investors taking the bold step into this market. That constraint absolutely made us better.
Your first SPV, Aerobavovna, closed oversubscribed. What did the investor response to that specific deal teach you about the actual appetite for Ukrainian defense exposure, versus what institutional fundraising conventional wisdom would predict?
Aerobavovna closed oversubscribed by more than 50%. Our next SPV, which is already closed and will be publicly announced shortly, came in oversubscribed by a similar margin. So we are seeing real, sustained appetite for Ukrainian defense exposure, and it is growing.A significant part of that demand is being driven by what's happening in the Middle East. The conflict with Iran has made the case in point: the West needs to learn from Ukrainian battlefield technology and adapt what our allies have been building for years now, in a capital-efficient, low-cost posture. We need expendable systems. Drone interceptors, counter-UAS systems, and the platforms that enable all of it. Ukraine is the innovation hub for the doctrine that's going to define the next decade of Western defense procurement, and investors are starting to internalize that.
On the fundraising side, the conventional wisdom got it half right. The hardest check to land is the first one. After that, it does become a snowball. We have a deep network of supporters who genuinely want to be involved in Ukraine and who can see the opportunity clearly, but being the first into something unfamiliar is daunting. What's changed is that we now have closed deals on the board. We've proven the model and proven the execution. With our first SPV closed, our second about to be announced, and two more moving through the pipeline, future raises get materially easier and our track record compounds.
Most venture firms talk about proprietary deal flow. You talk about intelligence as a moat. What's the operational difference between those two postures, and why does that distinction matter more in this market than in a typical venture environment?
In Ukraine, deal flow isn't the constraint. Once you're inside the ecosystem, you see passionate entrepreneurs building interesting things in every direction. You just have to keep your eyes open. Plenty of venture firms in the space recognize this, many of them proud members of Techosystem, and we actively share deal flow with each other because we all want these founders to succeed. It's a collaborative, uplifting environment.
So if everyone can see the deals, the edge has to be somewhere else. For us, the moat is intelligence, and specifically the combination of backgrounds my partner Vlad and I bring to every diligence package.
I work the geopolitical layer. How is the macro environment around Ukraine shifting on an ongoing basis? There are real macro headwinds from Russia's unjustified invasion. There are also significant tailwinds in defense, AI, medtech, dual-use, and infrastructure. The job is to read those forces and make sure every company we look at is positioned not just for the current fight but for the moment Ukraine returns to a peaceful, prosperous economy and competes globally on its merits.
Vlad runs the technology and battlefield layer. He's an open-source intelligence expert, and he can evaluate a defense product at the capability level: how it interacts with adjacent systems, how it performs in real battlefield conditions, and where its applicability extends beyond Ukraine into critical infrastructure protection and into other allied markets facing their own unique threat environments. He is the backbone of our diligence. Without that specific skill set, we couldn't form a critical, well-informed view of what we're actually buying.In a normal venture environment, just having deal flow may be enough. In this market, without understanding what's truly unique, you end up chasing the splashiest, sexiest story instead of identifying the companies that can compound across multiple innovation cycles. We're quite excited about what we've identified to date and what's coming down the pipeline.

Every Pravo target gets screened for postwar applicability and global growth potential, not just battlefield relevance. Why is that filter non-negotiable, and what does it disqualify that other Ukraine-focused investors might accept?
We firmly believe there's a difference between a good product and a good company. On the battlefield, what you need is a good product. You need impactful teams building something that solves a real problem right here, right now. But we've also seen that the innovation cycle in Ukraine has compressed dramatically. The enemy responds to every new capability, the Ukrainian Armed Forces and Ukraine's protectors respond back with a new solution, and the result is that individual products can become obsolete very quickly.
That dynamic is exactly why our filter is non-negotiable. We focus on two things. First, the underlying platforms that those products are built and iterated on, because platforms have far longer staying power than any single capability sitting on top of them. Second, what the company looks like the day after Ukraine wins. Are there clear export opportunities? Can the technology be redirected to protect critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, shipping lanes, allied borders? Is this team already thinking in those terms?
That last question matters as much as any technical answer. If the founders haven't started reasoning about strategic implications and future growth pathways, the company isn't going to be impactful and relevant for years to come, no matter how strong the current product is.
What does that disqualify? Some genuinely excellent battlefield products. Programs like Brave1 exist precisely because those products need to be built and launched, and that work is essential. But many of those efforts are better served by grant capital than by growth-oriented investment. The moment you take growth capital, you're accepting an obligation to think strategically about the future of the business. A lot of the founders building purely for the immediate fight should be entirely focused on the battlefield and on how their work shapes Ukraine's fight for freedom. We don't want our capital to be the thing that pulls them off of that.
In a recent op-ed, you wrote that framing Ukrainians as “superhuman” actually “insults their work and lets other Western entrepreneurs off the hook.” How do you balance that intellectual honesty with the practical reality that investors often need an emotional hook to commit capital?
Support for Ukraine has, unfortunately, become deeply politicized in the West, and the lane we want to operate in is being the most trustworthy and transparent operator in the Ukraine-focused syndicated investment space. That posture dictates the approach.
We lead with the business case. Why this is an investable opportunity, why Ukraine is an investable geography, and what these entrepreneurs have been able to accomplish despite genuinely terrible circumstances.
The emotional hook then functions as a litmus test instead of a sales tactic. If someone fundamentally doesn't want to support Ukraine, no financial argument is going to move them, and we'd rather learn that in the first five minutes than the fifth meeting. If the conviction is there, the business case is what carries the conversation the rest of the way.
What we will not do is sell Ukraine as a charity case. Ukraine has moved well beyond that framing. This is a geography we should be partnering with, innovating alongside, and building alongside for decades to come. And the “superhuman” framing is exactly the kind of well-intentioned distortion that breaks down on contact with reality. If you set Ukrainians up as miraculous, you're setting them up against expectations no team anywhere could fulfill, and the moment the inevitable hard quarter arrives, the people who bought the myth disengage. That's how you lose long-term Western capital and long-term Western attention. Treat Ukrainian founders as serious operators executing in serious conditions, and the relationship lasts.

Your thesis on labor scarcity as a catalyst for AI and autonomous systems is compelling. But aggressive automation in reconstruction also raises questions about who captures the value, capital holders or Ukrainian workers. How do you think about that tension?
This is going to be one of the defining questions of our era, not only in Ukraine but globally. With thoughtful public policy, the spread of AI represents a real opportunity to improve people's lives at scale. Without it, the same technology channels enormous wealth creation into a handful of firms and leaves hardworking people on the outside, resentful of the broader society they're supposed to be part of. That's a corrosive outcome anywhere. In a country coming out of armed conflict, it would be catastrophic.
What's needed is public sector leadership willing to put forward a coherent, actionable, forward-looking policy that strikes the right balance: don't hamper AI development, and don't leave people in the past. Those two objectives are usually framed as opposites. They don't have to be.
Ukraine has a real opportunity here. The cohesion and shared sense of national purpose that has emerged through the war is a genuine policy asset. It creates the conditions for designing a framework that ensures everyone across the Ukrainian economy participates in the upside of AI and autonomous systems, without dampening the pace of development.
There's also a structural advantage that gets overlooked. Ukraine is not the country racing to build the next frontier LLM or foundation model. That competition is between the US and China. Ukraine's lane is the practical application layer: how AI augments the workforce, how it integrates into industries that need to rebuild, how autonomous systems get deployed in the real economy. That positioning gives the country room to move with intention. To take the extra second to think through second-order consequences before they become irreversible. Done well, Ukraine can become the case that other countries study for how to deploy this technology in a way that the workforce captures real value.
When Ukraine achieves peace and valuations normalize as risk premiums compress, what is Pravo's enduring reason to exist once the current arbitrage closes?
We want Pravo to be a trustworthy, respected firm operating at the intersection of Western capital and Ukrainian opportunity, and we believe that intersection is going to be active for decades. A just and lasting peace doesn't close the opportunity. It opens the next phase of it.
Reconstruction and redevelopment alone represent generational deal flow. Beyond that, you have the broader opening of the Ukrainian market to Western investors and business partners, and the inverse flow of Ukrainian technology, much of it battle-tested in ways nothing else in the world can match, into global export markets. All of this requires trusted interlocutors who understand both sides of the table.
That's the role we're positioning for. Making sure the companies and individuals interacting across that corridor are doing so in ways that are genuinely mutually beneficial, and ensuring that Ukraine is put on the right footing for long-term success rather than extracted from in the short term.
It will be a healthy sign when the risk premiums compress. Ukraine has a tremendous amount to offer the global market, and we're firm believers in its ability to deliver on that for years to come. The arbitrage we're capturing today is a function of the current moment. The relationships, the on-the-ground intelligence, and the trust we are building through this period are durable, and they are what the firm is actually being built on.

Looking five years ahead: what is the single most important insight about the intersection of geopolitics, frontier technology, and capital that Western investors and policymakers are still fundamentally getting wrong?
The single insight Western investors and policymakers are still getting wrong is: just start.
It sounds cliché, but the gap between what's possible and what's happening right now is almost entirely a gap of action. I'm not talking about rebuilding an entire country in a single move. That requires enormous coordinated capital and serious public sector leadership. I'm talking about the hundreds of meaningful entry points that exist today, where relatively modest investments, all things considered, can build real capability in countries like Ukraine and across the broader frontier. Those investments may not change the entire course of a nation, but they change the trajectory of an entrepreneur, a team, a family, a community. And once you demonstrate that credible pathways exist, the effect compounds.
What we have instead is years of conferences, panel discussions, online talks, and books. Everyone is articulating the scale of what needs to be done. Very few are putting one foot in front of the other. The Techosystem community is one of the clearest exceptions to that pattern. There are ambitious firms and individuals across the West who are actually deploying capital into Ukraine and seeing the returns, both financial and strategic. The case studies exist, but for most large organizations, it remains the talking phase, and it has been the talking phase for years. That's disappointing to us.
That's where smaller, nimbler firms and individuals come in. The ones willing to take the first step even when the step is small. That's how lasting change gets built in this category. Take the first action, generate the first proof point, let the effect compound.