On Valentine’s Day, together with Everstar, we invite you to find the perfect match — a profession that fits your love language and will have a meaningful impact on important processes and other people’s lives.

What makes your heart beat faster

What drives you forward when you’re looking for a new job? Maybe it’s a big mission, a friendly team, the company’s reputation, working conditions, or salary.

And what if you amplify your skills with meaning, depth and interesting tasks, and give them a shared purpose — work that helps defend your country?

Below in the article — a list of current roles in MilTech mapped to love languages: acts of service, words of affirmation, talent scouting as a gift, product interaction and attention to detail.

Choose yours to add more meaning to what you do every day.

Your love language — acts of service — managers 

Managers in MilTech are the drivers of an entire ecosystem where technologies become answers to complex challenges, and every participant feels part of a large and valuable goal. You are the one who moves all processes to turn into reality the product that a whole team works on.

Which responsibilities usually make eyes sparkle? 

💞 keeping a finger on the pulse to find the perfect match in processes;

💞 building teams and finding solutions to create a super product; 

💞 working with partners and government bodies at a strategic level;

💞 removing the unnecessary to make room for what matters most — speed and efficiency;

💞 caring for every workflow because stability depends on it.

Your love language — words of affirmation — marketers and communications specialists

In civilian life you know how to increase traffic and make people fall for brands through creative campaigns and communications. In MilTech, words become the foundation of trust — they attract external resources and strengthen relationships within teams.

A special challenge is finding the perfect balance between what should be spoken about loudly and what requires silence.

Which responsibilities bring new feelings?

💞 creating messages that unite the team around a common goal and give everyone a sense of the importance of their contribution;

💞 finding the right words for partners and investors to turn their support into real tools for effective synergy; 

💞 building trust in Ukrainian developments by emphasizing their quality, resilience and scalability;

💞 developing communications that build trust under very strict NDAs;

💞 broadcasting the team’s successes in a way that works better than any advertisement.

Your love language — talent scouting as a gift — HR, recruiters 

Today you run several interviews and close the next offers. But what if you turn routine tasks into a special mission? 

In MilTech recruiting you become an ambassador for the industry, opening a whole new world for people, finding talent for unicorn companies and often working like James Bond — under the label «top secret».

Which responsibilities will make you fall in love with the role even more? 

💞 introducing candidates to the MilTech industry and creating that moment of «love at first sight» — through meaning, culture, teams, opportunities and values;

💞 closing unique roles — from Lead Antenna Engineer to EW specialists, finding the perfect match in every niche;

💞 finding rare talents for companies whose solutions change the industry;

💞 ensuring security and anonymity — professionally handling confidential information, which is critically important for the MilTech community.

💞 influencing the building of strong teams — bringing together people from R&D, marketing and production, turning a set of vacancies into a well-oiled mechanism.

Your love language — attention to detail — analysts 

In MilTech, the quality time you spend analyzing data transforms into precision of decisions that directly affect real manufacturing. In this field it’s extremely important that every resource is used as efficiently as possible. 

What will make your eyes light up with excitement?

💞 measuring the effectiveness of solutions, processes and teams at every stage;

💞 turning chaos into ordered solutions for product and company development;

💞 finding growth points and opportunities that often hide behind dry numbers;

💞 optimizing time spent collecting and processing data to focus on finding meaning;

💞 building a system of metrics and KPIs to see where the business is really heading.

Your love language — product interaction — engineers

In MilTech, digital models become physical objects in which every mechanism, assembly or board must work flawlessly even in extreme conditions. The R&D department here is a space where bold engineering hypotheses travel from drawings to real prototypes that are hardened in field tests.

Which responsibilities will make you love this profession even more?

💞 creating solutions from scratch and bringing even the most unreal ideas to life;

💞 caring about the reliability of the design — controlling every connector and the strength of the housing;

💞 conducting field tests — checking how the product behaves in real conditions;

💞 constantly improving ergonomics and finding the perfect match between complex technologies and ease of use;

💞 seeing how a physical object created by your hands comes to life and protects lives. 

In MilTech engineering — it’s the moment when an idea stops being theory. Just imagine: while you read this article, your solution could be helping to carry out a million successful missions at the front.

This is a field for those who need to touch the result of their work: verify assembly, test solutions in the field, see how the product works. Here the engineer feels maximum responsibility and, at the same time, maximum engagement.

Three reasons to go on a first date with MilTech

• A sense of pride in what you create. You work with solutions that deliver real results visible today.
• The shortest path from idea to release. MilTech is about fast implementation of ideas, cutting away the unnecessary and focusing on what works. 
• A high level of trust and unity. In this field teams unite around a single mission, where everyone works toward a common result. 

Everstar — a hub of opportunities for those building the technological future.
It brings together people and technologies in cooperation with leading MilTech companies in Ukraine — from drone manufacturers to R&D labs and teams creating defense systems.

Visit the company website and look for a vacancy that fits your love language, because today is the perfect day to find your professional perfect match.

Choose a vacancy

For a joint project with ARMA Instruments, AIN.Capital talked with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Pim Donkers, to figure out why communications security is so important right now and discussed how ARMA G1 Mark II can help change the face of modern warfare in Ukraine.

The publication was prepared in partnership with ARMA
What does it mean?

About ARMA Instruments

ARMA Instruments was founded in 2017 by Pim Donkers, Alex Smirnoff, and Andrey Loginov in response to significant events in the field of privacy and out of skepticism against existing secure communications solutions. ARMA, or Advanced Relay Mission Applications, swiftly grew into an international company with EU, US, Switzerland, and Ukraine offices.

ARMA develops and manufactures secure communications and data solutions. Its first product, the ARMA G1 Secure Communicator, is the company’s business card to the industry, which allows communications beyond what you could classify as TOP SECRET.

What is the ARMA G1 Secure Communicator?

The ARMA G1 is a mobile device for person-to-person communications designed for absolute security resistant to even future quantum computer brute force attacks.

In comparison to popular software solutions that provide “similar” secure messenger services, like Signal or Whatsapp, ARMA delivers far more than just the software. The company designed a secure operating system and mobile hardware platform entirely from scratch. 

“You could say ARMA G1 is a hardware-dedicated messenger.”

Additionally, the solution may serve as a base platform that can be expanded to fit any need, from file sharing and internet browsing to remotely controlling minefields. According to the company, even the first US-based power plant organizations started relying on the ARMA G1 as a fallback system in case of a significant cyberattack.

It is more secure to communicate with the G1 than directly between two people in person. You can eavesdrop on people’s live conversations in more ways than you think. Furthermore, where “security by obscurity” was mainstream in the industry for years, we offer complete transparency and design systems that, for some significant parts, don’t need your trust since we leave them out, such as message servers. What is not there cannot be attacked by the enemy. This serverless approach is revolutionary. Furthermore, we keep the code base clean and easily verifiable.

Pim Donkers, CEO and co-founder at ARMA Instruments

What benefits does a separate device provide when compared to widely used apps that claim to offer a similar encrypted messaging experience, for example, Signal?

 “For starters, Signal and other messaging apps are offered for free. Where do you think they get paid from? A rule of thumb is that if you do not pay for the product, you are the product. For your understanding, WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion! But regardless of any security claims these products make, they only “secure” the software level. These apps have no control over the mobile phone they are hosted on (iPhone, Samsung, Google Pixel, etc) or the operating system. You need to secure all three levels. What use is Signal if your keystrokes and thus passwords are leaked to the Russians by other means?”, Donkers comments. 

G1 is not a typical consumer device. It is a security weapon

Donkers continues, “If I wanted to sabotage, say, a power plant. The most sensible thing to do would be to track down those who have access to it and compromise them. Protecting location data is for many persons-of-interest detrimental”.

This location protection is particularly detrimental to military personnel’s safety. For example, in Ukraine, many servicemen still use Signal or Telegram on consumer smartphones, which poses a high risk of becoming a direct target to the enemy. “ARMA G1 prevents targeted cyber attacks and physical attacks on its user. Just the phone number of any smartphone is enough to find it, including its owner, anywhere on the planet. Our patented Dynamic Identity feature changes the device’s complete cellular network identity regularly; furthermore, our clients, in all cases, remain fully anonymous, even to us. We were surprised that no one ever thought about this, given that companies such as Apple and Google spend billions on research but leave the obvious untouched”, Donkers comments.

ARMA G1 provides security on all three layers:

• Hardware;
• Operation system;
• Application level.

ARMA also introduces other security features, such as hardware anti-tampering and self-destruct, in case the device gets into the wrong hands. This significantly reduces the chances of compromising the location of critical military objects and people. Also, due to the “Trust No One” approach, no third-party components or code is trusted. For the same reason, the company abandoned the security-by-obscurity approach.

“Enough examples show that companies offering a black-box solution cannot be trusted. A great example was Crypto AG, a Swiss company selling cryptographic equipment to its allies for decades. It was only recently exposed as a CIA-owned operation. Companies like that screwed up the industry, and at this point, if you can not disclose to your stakeholders what you are doing, you should not be trusted,” Pim Donkers says.

How to message through ARMA G1?

Working with ARMA G1 doesn’t require any changes in your existing infrastructure:

• After purchasing an X amount of ARMA G1s, you will receive random codes to activate them at the device startup.

• You then press “add contact” in the UI, where you can either create or enter a code. 

The created short-lived code will be entered on the other device, and the devices will handshake using the TOR network. The codes may be shared in person or via unsecured channels like your iPhone.

• You can then send messages, which will be encrypted on the device using well-established encryption algorithms and directly transmitted to the other device using random TOR servers around the globe, with each step erasing its previous tracks.

“Although TOR has its encryption, we do not rely on it. For us, it’s a way to wash out any metadata and avoid using centralized servers. So, since we do not use message servers at all and use TOR servers for transport, we call it “serverless” messaging,” Pim Donkers explains.

• Furthermore, the G1 base platform may be expanded with additional features that tailor our client’s needs. 

ARMA G1 is available in Ukraine

ARMA has centered much of its development in Ukraine. Thus, ARMA G1 is, in a way, a Ukrainian product. The relationship with Ukraine started before the full-scale war, returning to 2017. When the war began, the company remained loyal and fully supported its team in Ukraine.

On October 24, 2023, ARMA Instruments introduced the ARMA G1 Mark II in Kyiv, launching the device in the Ukrainian market. According to the company, Ukraine is pivotal in fostering innovation amidst geopolitical turmoil.

For 2024, ARMA decided to increase investment in Ukraine and establish a local subsidiary to develop and manufacture locally to support a national Ukrainian defense industry and get a competitive edge against Russia regarding secure communications.

Does ARMA G1 have a global impact?

“You are probably familiar with the proverb “Knowledge is power,” meaning knowledge gives one the ability to conquer the world. That implies that leaking sensitive data to your enemy is, in effect, transferring power. Our solution would benefit the defense forces of any nation that still dares to exchange files and discuss strategy with consumer devices such as iPhones and Google phones, which is still common practice in Ukraine. In all cases, the business model of a smartphone manufacturer heavily leans on selling consumer data, and the device’s design philosophy was and will always remain centered around that business model,” Pim Donkers says.

How will this protect against the current influx of advanced Russian offensive malware? ARMA’s business model is the security of our clients. We protect anything from discussing strategy, troop positions, equipment movements, etc. The platform could also serve as a secure terminal in Operational Technology to access military equipment such as a minefield, nuclear power plants, etc. ARMA G1 offers a secure base platform that will stop leaks of power, which directly helps to win the war and save lives.

Slava Ukraini!

Pim Donkers, CEO and co-founder at ARMA Instruments

We are talking with the founder and CEO of N1 investment Fund Nykyta Izmaylov on Zoom for this interview. He is in Europe at Web Summit, like thousands of Ukrainians who went to Europe’s main technology conference. Izmaylov is sure that attending of such events is extremely useful. “You can see the experience of others, gain expertise, knowledge, contacts, and get with all this back to your home country, Ukraine, to implement locally,” the investor claims.

In the pragmatic view of the N1 founder, “the import of foreign experience” will help Ukraine to recover faster and, most importantly, more efficiently after the full-scale war.

The Editor of AIN.UA questioned N1 about how the fund is doing overall, how its projects went through the nine months of the war, and what are its plans for the future.

The publication was prepared in partnership withN1
What does it mean?

The N1 fund has a specific focus on fintech startups.

Right now, 90% of its portfolio is centred around the following projects:

• sportbank mobile bank,
• Asquad payment system,
• TRANSENIX, a Tap2Phone technology-based service that turns a smartphone into a payment terminal,
• Money4YOU, a microloan service.

The fund’s total amount of investments exceeds $10 million. At the beginning of 2022, it was planned that N1 would make at least 4-5 more investments for a total amount of about $5 million, doubling the portfolio.

“It’s funny to remember now, but we even wrote an unusual description of the projects that we are interested in. One of them we called ‘quite a catch’,” Izmaylov jokes. If no kidding, N1 is targeting projects that are already generating cash flow, and need funding and support for scaling.

After February 24, the N1 plans as the plans of all Ukrainians, to put it mildly, went to hell. For the first two months, there was no work at all, the fund’s employees were engaged in volunteering and helping the Ukrainian Armed Forces and refugees abroad as much as they could. Closer to the summer, it became clear that it could not last so long, and we began returning to work. We started with developing a strategy.

What did the fund started with?

First, we focused on the projects we have already invested in. They all kept the team, continued to work and grow. So that was the N1 number one task.

At the same time, we did not drop the idea of ​​developing the fund, so we returned to the search for projects. To be honest, practically no new startups appeared during the war. This is probably due to the fact that now, during martial law, even those who had ideas to implement their own business are in a situation where they do not understand where to start. But we had certain lead specialists with whom we managed to get to know by February 24, so we worked with them.

Are there any chances N1 will close the deals before the end of the year?

Yes, there are high chances that we will close some deals. They will be not pure fintechs, but rather  businesses where a fintech component can be added. For example, specialized marketplaces, which we seriously consider as our investment goals, but it is in them a fintech component is absent. That is why we are considering bringing our expertise to those projects as one of the ways to invest. But, as I said, they are not fintech in their pure form.

Another vector of our development is Web3.

In a conversation with AIN.UA, Izmaylov explained that the work of the fund had to be reshaped because a problem arose during its development. The fund simultaneously helped to build startups, such as sportbank, and operated as an investor, as in the case of Money4YOU. Here comes the problem: the same team member analyzes investment proposals (how to invest funds) and thinks about how to develop the current projects. So it was decided to divide these directions into the following:

• N1 as an investment fund operating as a venture fund,
• N1 as a venture builder or a company that creates and helps startups to create companies from the idea stage to its full implementation,
• N1 as an investor in crypto projects.

The first two points are clear, but the crypto looks like a new story for N1. Why did you decide to draw attention to it?

These days, I had an opportunity to talk with large funds, such as BlackRock or Morgan Stanley. It became clear that a crypto component is a must-have for fintech. In a year or two, if your company doesn’t deal with crypto or blockchain in any way, or somehow doesn’t use tokens or NFTs — it means you’re kind of old-school, you’re not using all the possibilities. Startups that have something to do with the blockchain, at least for 1%, will be able to raise investments with more ease.

Therefore, I decided that my fund will also look for startups in this area and build expertise gradually. A lot of Ukrainians I know are deeply rooted in this subject. NEAR Protocol, for instance. In addition, the crypto market has in fact been legalized in Ukraine.

That is why N1 plans include crypto.

This is a promising vector, and I am already looking for a team to develop it. The team will be up to 10 people who are only engaged in the crypto market.

Is Ukraine also among the focuses?

Cryptohistory was created so as not to be limited to one country. That is why we follow both Ukraine directly and all of Europe at the same time.

Ukraine remains an important market for N1. Nykyta repeatedly emphasized this during our conversation — the N1 office in Kyiv continues to work, the team is in place, as are the projects.

To confirm, a few weeks before speaking to Izmaylov, the editorial staff of AIN.UA interviewed Denis Saprykin, the head of one of the N1 portfolio companies, the sportbank mobile bank. He did not hide, things are not going easily, but the bank continues to develop and increase its growth metrics. But all plans still came to naught, because of the full-scale invasion, Izmaylov states without smiling.

How is the flagship of your portfolio doing?

By February 24, sportbank’s goals were the following:

• one million customers by the end of 2022,
• investment payback by the end of 2022,
• loan portfolio of 1.5 billion hryvnias,
• deposit portfolio of about 1 billion hryvnias.

After February 24, everything has changed. Now the goals include about 650,000 customers by the end of the year, loan portfolio amounted to 700 million hryvnias, and 300 million hryvnias in deposits.

How do you think, will you succeed in achieving the previous goals by the end of 2023?

This is unlikely to happen. The economy fell by about 35%. We will increase by 5%, maximum 10%, every next year. Yes, by 10% each year is an upward trend, and we are a young team with a young product, and that will allow us to grow. But I don’t believe that the economy and society in general will grow at such a rate that we will catch up to the level we had before the full-scale war. I think, we will be able to return to these indicators in 2024-2025.

What do I mean? The number of clients and the nominal value of the portfolio itself — we will absolutely reach these numbers. We will reach the mark of 1 million clients, that is clear, but the value that we will be able to generate from each client will be much less than what we could generate before the full-scale war. There is a question about this, and it is based on several things.

First, the purchasing power of the hryvnia has dropped. The second is that the cost of the resource has increased and will remain expensive for several more years. The discount rate is 25% now, and I think it will stay at this level for the next 2-3 years. Would it be 20% or 18%, it will directly affect the profitability of this business. Because even if you attract resources from the people in the form of deposits, these deposits are expensive, and you still need to promise the market that you will pay 16-17% for each one. The other side of this process is issuing loans, where the rate will be effective somewhere up to 45-50%. Given the default and other overhead costs, this puts the business at the edge of standard profitability.

Even if it turns out that our customer base will be 2 and then 3 million, it will still be difficult to achieve pre-war strategic indicators. Because, unfortunately, our country itself has become poorer, and it will take 3-4 years for it to reach the pre-war level of population wealth. It is normal, we do understand the state of things, it’s just force majeure circumstances that basically reset us to zero.

It may seem that Nykyta evaluates the situation very soberly. He himself looks at it differently and describes his approach as pragmatic. “I would rather be wrong, and we will recover in 1 year, than talk about the positive just for a story,” he clarifies. In his forecasts, he tries to rely on a long-term strategy that allows assessing risks and not waiting for quick results.

The other three companies also have problems.

• Asquad, the Ukrainian analogue of Stripe, planned to enter the market in March-April. The war made its adjustments. The startup’s development slowed down for half a year, full-fledged work resumed in fact only in October 2022. Now we have to catch up, adapting to the conditions of the market, which is not aimed to develop, but to survive. The focus for 2023 is the European market, the volume of which is larger and the state is better.
• TRANSENIX fully became part of the N1 portfolio already during the full-scale war. The deal was closed in the summer. It is a complex product, the success of which is achieved due to many components. Cool technology — available, Visa and MasterCard licenses — received, local team — available, partner banks — in process. Earlier, another company from Belarus tried to enter the market, but Ukraine was not their main market, so the attempts were not successful. We are sure that we will be able to create a high-quality and demanded product in this direction, so our nearest plan is to cover Ukraine as much as possible.
• For Money4YOU, the market has tightened a lot — its volume decreased by three times.

It might seem that the situation is worse than anywhere else. But Nykyta keeps his chin up and speaks with such a confident, as if he knows for sure that the situation will improve very soon.

When you see such results, it is very difficult. How do you deal with it?

As I said above, I analyze events pragmatically. Yes, there is enough positive. First, I see that Ukrainians really want to return to Ukraine and rebuild it. Many people who have left the country absorb the demand, the experience, they absorb the new vision, they generate new ideas that they have seen in the countries of their current presence. And when those Ukrainians will return home, and they will surely do so, they will come with new ideas and begin to develop them here. Some of them will create new companies that we can invest in.

Secondly, after talking with large investors and investment funds, I understand that there is currently no high demand for Ukrainian companies and Ukrainian startups. But there is one important thing. Ukraine has expressed itself to the whole world as a strong brand. And now, even those investors from large funds who mentioned Ukraine maybe once a year or once every 10 years, now they know exactly where our country is, what its territory is, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. A kind of SEO optimization of Ukraine as a country, as a future investment hub.

Our prospects are good.

The main thing now is the victory.

We will definitely rebuild and recreate everything else.