How Griselda Raised $600,000 With an Investor-Ready Legal Structure

Griselda is a small, Kyiv-based team building a geoinformation platform for the defense and security sector, founded in 2022 by Oleksii Teplukhin and Dmytro Shamrai. The platform pulls together HUMINT, OSINT, SIGINT and IMINT into one picture, raising situational awareness for military and humanitarian operations. Visit Griselda

Double Tap Investments is a Finnish-Ukrainian investment firm founded in 2023 by Jan Saarinen, Mikko-Pekka Hanski and Oles Khudoba, backing Ukrainian defense, cybersecurity and AI startups. It led Griselda's $600,000 round, and its portfolio has since grown to include drone makers Black Forest Systems and Hard Cat Drones, with individual checks typically in the €100,000 to €200,000 range.

International investors expect more than a strong product before they fund a Ukrainian DefenceTech company. They expect a transparent corporate structure, a clear system of governance, and legally binding rules for how the company and its investors will work together.

To close its round, Griselda needed to prepare for exactly that: structuring its corporate relationships, setting the rules for how the company would be governed, and agreeing the terms of the investment deal itself.

Without a defined legal model, the risk was not abstract. Disagreements could surface over who held authority, how key decisions got made, and how future capital would be raised.

That risk reached past the current round. An unclear governance structure could complicate not just this deal, but Griselda's later funding rounds and its ability to scale internationally.

We built Griselda's legal foundation for foreign financing across four pieces of work.

1. 1Corporate structuring. We analyzed and restructured Griselda's corporate model so it matched what international investors expect, while keeping enough flexibility for the company to keep growing on its own terms.
2. 2Corporate governance. Separately, we designed a governance system that set:
   • the order in which key decisions get made;
   • the authority held by founders and by investors;
   • the rules governing how the parties interact;
   • mechanisms to check whether agreements are followed;
   • the conditions for raising further capital.
3. 3Investment agreements. We prepared the investment agreements themselves, recording the commercial and corporate terms both sides agreed to. The documents were built to hold up for this round and for further scaling and future international partners, not just for the deal in front of them.
4. 4Negotiation support. Throughout negotiations, we worked directly with investors, helping both sides land on a cooperation model that was transparent and easy to act on. That meant balancing Griselda's interests against the investors', and building a legal foundation the partnership could run on long after this round closed.

Griselda raised $600,000 in a round led by Double Tap Investments, a Finnish-Ukrainian investment firm, as first reported by AIN.UA.

The funding let Griselda expand its data processing capabilities, continue developing its AI-driven platform, and build specialized products for the defense and security sector.

The corporate structure and governance system we built also gave Griselda a foundation for future funding rounds and for deeper cooperation with European and international security organizations.

For us, the Griselda deal is a working example of what comprehensive legal support can do for Ukrainian DefenceTech companies: turn technical expertise into a business that international capital can understand, trust and fund.

It also reflects where the market is heading. Foreign investors are paying closer attention to Ukrainian technology in AI, data processing and defense, and deals like this one are what let Ukrainian developers scale their products and grow their presence internationally.

If your company is preparing to raise foreign capital, the legal model behind the deal decides whether an international investor can underwrite you, and that has to be settled long before the term sheet. What we did here, corporate structuring, a governance system and investment agreements built for more than one round, is what that foundation looks like when it is built before the raise, not during it.

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