Support Ukraine’s defence capabilities and make profit: Business Censor examined Inzhur MilTech fund based on its own experience

Author: Vladyslav Nedashkivskyi

On August 13, a new investment tool, the Inzhur MilTech Fund, was launched on the domestic investment market. The idea behind it is that private investors can invest in a specific weapons manufacturer, thereby not only supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities but also earning a projected return of at least 25%.

Business Censor couldn’t ignore this new development, so it decided to find out first-hand how it all works, where such high returns come from, and what risks lie behind the attractive promises.

What is the Inzhur MilTech fund?

Inzhur MilTech is a unit-based investment fund whose assets consist of corporate bonds issued by Vyriy Industries – one of Ukraine’s largest manufacturers of unmanned systems. Inzhur acts as the underwriter for these bonds, meaning it manages the process of placing the securities and distributing them on the market. The bonds have a maturity of three years.

By investing in Inzhur MilTech, you become the holder of an investment certificate in the fund and a co-owner of its assets. At the time of publication, there are 30,593 co-owners of the fund, 1,438,600 certificates in circulation, and the value of assets stands at 1.484 billion UAH.

Why is it not possible to invest directly in Vyriy Industries’ bonds? This is due to the specific nature of the company’s activities. Vyriy Industries’ financial information is classified by order of the Ministry of Defence and is not subject to public disclosure. It is precisely for this reason that the company cannot carry out a public bond issue, whilst a private placement, in accordance with current legislation, allows for no more than 150 investors to be involved.

Essentially, the mechanism is simple: an individual purchases a fund certificate; the fund invests these funds in Vyriy Industries’ corporate bonds; and the company uses the raised capital to expand production – for example, by purchasing components for drones. After all, these must always be readily available to fulfil contracts. However, due to the time lag between purchasing components and receiving payment for finished products, the rapid scaling of working capital is not always sufficient. It is precisely this problem that the Inzhur MilTech fund is designed to address.

Incidentally, within 20 days of the fund’s launch, over 24,000 Ukrainians had invested 1 billion hryvnia in Vyriy Industries’ drone production. The company’s total funding requirement is estimated at 4 billion hryvnia, which Inzhur aims to raise from private investors. This amount could be reduced by bank loans or advance payments for products. However, the fund’s total volume amounts to up to 5 billion hryvnias, with 1 billion hryvnias set aside as a technical reserve for reinvesting coupon payments.

Yield and taxes

Every 35 days, Vyriy Industries pays coupon income on the bonds. The fund reinvests these funds, i.e. it purchases new bonds, thereby increasing the value of private investments.

Thus, at launch, the certificate had a face value of 1,000 UAH. Subsequently, the price is determined based on the fund’s net asset value (NAV) per certificate. The accumulated coupon income from the bonds increases the NAV daily. Buy and sell prices are determined on the basis of the NAV. At the time of publication, the entry threshold for the fund was 1,031.74 UAH.

The projected average annual simple return on the Inzhur MilTech fund over three years ranges from 25 per cent to 29 per cent in hryvnia – the highest rate on the corporate bond market. Moreover, the bonds have a fixed maturity date, so the later an investor joins the fund, the less time there is for coupon reinvestment and capitalisation to work. After a certain date, the model no longer yields the projected return of 25 per cent. Consequently, the fund is accepting investor capital only until 31 December 2026.

"If the minimum acceptable level of average annual projected return is 25 per cent per annum in hryvnia (provided the investment is held to maturity), then the final investment deadline by which such a return can be guaranteed is the end of 2026. This is precisely why the fund has a limited investment window," Inzhur explains.

At the same time, the issuer, namely Vyriy Industries, has the right to decide on early redemption or a change to the bond yield after the end of the first and second years of their circulation. The Inzhur MilTech fund’s yield forecast takes into account the possibility of the bond yield falling to 22 per cent per annum in hryvnia for the second and third years of their circulation.

Another important point is taxation. Unlike domestic government bonds (OVDPs), income from corporate bonds is subject to tax. However, there is a caveat:

• If you exit the investment early (the Inzhur MilTech fund allows for this), you will need to pay 23 per cent (18 per cent personal income tax + 5 per cent military levy) on the difference between the purchase price and the sale price of the fund’s certificates. In other words, hypothetically, if you bought at 1,025 UAH and sold at 1,100 UAH, you would pay tax on 75 UAH (17.25 UAH per certificate).
• If you wait until the bonds mature in 2029 and the fund closes, the income will be paid out as dividends, which are taxed at a rate of 14% (9% personal income tax + 5% military levy).

Fund participants do not need to worry about paying taxes, as Inzhur acts as a tax agent, withholding all necessary amounts and submitting the relevant reports to the tax authorities.

How to invest in Inzhur MilTech

Go to the Inzhur website and click ‘Log in’ in the top right-hand corner. Alternatively, you can download the mobile app. I ended up using a hybrid approach, but more on that later.

The system prompts you to either log in to your personal account or register. As this is my first time investing with Inzhur, I’m registering.

It’s a standard form asking for an email address, a phone number and a password of your choice. You also need to tick the box to consent to the processing of your personal data.

To be honest, I registered via the mobile app – it was more convenient that way. Links for iOS and Android.

Next, you need to verify your identity. This is a mandatory KYC (Know Your Client ) procedure carried out by banks, stock exchanges and other financial companies to facilitate future dealings with the client. The system suggests doing this via Diia. However, if you don’t have Diia, or if it doesn’t contain the required documents – an ID card or a foreign passport – you can verify your identity via the BankID system.

I found it easier to complete the procedure via Diia. To do this, you need to open the app on your smartphone and use its built-in scanner to scan the QR code from your computer screen. Next, you need to select the required documents and confirm their submission to Inzhur.

The next step is to complete the investor questionnaire. Here you must specify:

• e-mail;
• bank account details in IBAN format;
• residential address;
• average monthly income;
• sources of funds;
• ownership of assets, including movable and immovable property;
• PEP status – politically exposed persons, or links to them;
• tax residency status in a jurisdiction other than Ukraine;
• US tax residency.

You’ll need a bank account for dividend payments, so choose the one where the money will ultimately be paid into. Your residential or registered address must be in government-controlled territory in Ukraine. Residents of temporarily occupied territories or the aggressor country are, of course, not eligible to participate in the fund. A different type of relationship is established with non-residents.

All other questions on the application form are part of the standard AML (anti-money laundering, combating the legalisation of proceeds of crime and countering the financing of terrorism) form, which is similar to a bank’s.

Once the application form has been completed, it can be reviewed and edited if necessary. If everything is correct, sign it using ‘Dіia.Signiture’ via the government app.

According to the system, the securities account is opened within 1 working day. If there is insufficient information, a company manager will contact you to clarify the details. Once your personal account has been successfully created, you should receive an SMS.

Actually, my biggest mistake, as I initially thought, was registering at 5 pm on a Saturday. I’d already reckoned I’d have to wait until Monday to continue the experiment, but Inzhur pleasantly surprised me. The text message confirming the successful opening of the account arrived within 15 minutes.

Your personal details, brokerage account balance, transaction history, funds available for investment and answers to frequently asked questions are all displayed in the account dashboard.

To invest in the Inzhur MilTech fund, you need to top up your brokerage account. I topped up my account with 1,025.04 UAH (the cost of one certificate as at 18 September) using my PrivatBank ‘Universal’ card. The state bank decided to charge me a fee of 5.13 UAH. So, in the end, I paid 1,030.17 UAH. It seems it’s worth choosing banks that don’t charge fees for payments made using bank details.

An important note: you must pay from your own card. Top-ups from third-party cards or sole trader accounts are not possible. As the system warns, funds are credited within 3 working hours.

However, just as with the text message regarding the creation of a personal account, the money was credited to the brokerage account within 15 minutes. I found this out via a push notification from the app. So it’s worth installing it.

At last, I can buy a fund participant certificate. To do this, I create an application directly from my personal account; the funds are blocked in the account, and the request is sent for processing.

Having already been spoilt by the 15-minute wait at previous stages, I thought I’d become the proud owner of a certificate almost instantly. But things didn’t go as planned. My purchase request wasn’t processed until Monday morning. This was because the depositories only operate from Monday to Friday (somehow I’d overlooked this point). So bear this in mind if you need the security straight away.

Incidentally, provided I do not buy any more certificates and do not exit the fund early, my projected income on the bond maturity date – 26 July 2029 – will amount to 719.45 UAH after tax. In other words, I should receive a total of 1,744.48 UAH.

What else is important to know

The golden rule of investing is to invest only money you can afford to lose, as any investment carries a risk. You shouldn’t dip into your last savings or use borrowed money for investments. That’s a path that leads nowhere, to put it mildly.

Nor should you invest all your spare cash in a single investment vehicle. You should always diversify your risks – in other words, as the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Corporate bonds, compared to government bonds, are a rather risky asset, especially in wartime. This raises a perfectly logical question: why invest in them at all – whether directly or via a mutual fund?

During a recent livestream discussing the details of the Inzhur MilTech fund, Inzhur’s founder and CEO, Andrii Zhurzhii, responded to a similar question from Business Censor by emphasising that if the main criterion is minimal credit risk, then government bonds are a perfectly reasonable choice. His company also offers government bonds to investors.

"These are simply two different instruments: one is state-issued, the other private, with higher risk and, accordingly, higher returns. Even after tax, MilTech’s yield is higher under current conditions. If, for example, government bonds yield around 17 per cent before tax, then a corporate instrument would need to yield around 22 per cent before tax just to match that return for the investor. Anything above that is a premium for the additional risk posed by a private issuer. In other words, 25 per cent here is not ‘free money’, but the price of that risk," noted Zhurzhii.

Vyriy Industries’ bonds are unsecured. In the event of a default, Inzhur will act on behalf of the fund in accordance with the law: it will demand repayment of the debt, take the matter to court and, if necessary, seek the seizure of assets and bank accounts. However, there is no collateral that automatically returns the money to the investor. Corporate bonds are also not the same as a bank deposit, so there is no equivalent of the Deposit Guarantee Fund for individuals.

"What we can do – and have done – is to assess this risk as thoroughly as possible before investing. Inzhur obtained and analysed Vyriy’s financial statements for 2024, 2025 and the first half of 2026. According to publicly disclosed data, in 2025 the company had revenue of around 11 billion UAH, over 2 billion UAH in equity and 2.1 billion UAH in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation – ed.). "On 14 August , Vyriy Industries and its bonds were assigned a long-term credit rating of uaBBB (moderate risk for investors – ed.) with a stable outlook, which is to be updated quarterly," Andrii Zhurzhii explained to Business Censor.

Deloitte – one of the leading international firms specialising in, amongst other things, audit services – will conduct the audit of Inzhur MilTech for the 2026 financial year.

At the same time, the recent searches carried out by the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) at Vyriy Industries may seem like a rather alarming warning sign. Business Censor also enquired about this. The company’s CEO, Oleksii Babenko, stated clearly: investigative actions took place in July, including over 60 searches, and the seized funds were returned to the company approximately two weeks later. However, Vyriy Industries’ operations have not been halted.

"Therefore, we cannot say that any legal or political risk has disappeared. However, there is also no basis for interpreting the mere fact of the investigative proceedings as a default by the company or an inability to meet its financial obligations," Andrii Zhurzhii noted in his response to our publication.

So, in summary, we have a moderately risky asset – according to the credit rating – that offers high returns with a fairly low entry threshold, which should be viewed as a long-term investment – until 2029. An added bonus is that the funds raised are not being channelled into some ephemeral cause, but are being used by a market-leading company to produce specific equipment that is absolutely essential for our defenders. This alone deserves attention.