Ukraine needs more private equity investment to develop its economy and support entrepreneurs who cannot obtain bank loans.
More private equity is needed to strengthen Ukraine’s investment ecosystem, particularly for businesses that traditional banks cannot lend to because of regulatory restrictions.
The Ukrainian private equity firm invested in Preply, a global technology company with Ukrainian founders that became the seventh unicorn with Ukrainian roots following its latest funding round. It also launched the €150 million ($177 million) Food4Impact fund together with Dutch agricultural investment fund 2ndAries.
Despite the war, national investment institutions and international financial institutions are prepared to take risks and invest in Ukraine, with a policy mandate to invest now while there are relatively few players in the market.
“Even if you have [war risk] insurance, it will not always save you,” Yakub says. “One of our portfolio companies set up its own fire service, but even that preparation did not help, and some of its assets were destroyed [in a Russian strike]. As investors in Ukraine, we simply have to live with these risks.”
Although investing in Ukraine is risky, foreign investment institutions are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukrainian investment funds to stimulate the country’s future recovery. This provides an additional flow of capital beyond the traditional banking sector, alongside instruments such as grants and bank guarantees. In 2025–2026, international financial institutions began investing in Ukraine’s reconstruction, including through the country’s leading investment funds.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) announced an equity investment of up to €5 million in Flyer One Ventures Fund V. This year, leading Ukrainian private equity firm Horizon Capital has already raised €150 million ($173 million) for its Catalyst Fund from IFC, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Nordic development agencies. Dragon Capital has also raised capital from global and regional international financial institutions for two funds: the Rebuild Ukraine Fund (REBUF) and the Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I.
“The sooner more players enter the market, the better. Even if we are not building factories, every job represents an investment in salaries, working capital and offices. Creating one job costs tens of thousands of dollars, and creating a million jobs costs tens of billions,” Yakub said.
Diligent Capital Partners invests in Ukrainian entrepreneurs so they can build companies “wherever they choose to succeed”, as Yakub describes DCP’s mission.
DCP’s portfolio is divided between so-called “asset-light” investments in technology companies and “asset-heavy” investments in Ukraine’s mid-sized agricultural businesses. Its publicly disclosed technology investments include $16 million in Preply and $7 million in Philippine neobank Tonik. In agriculture, in addition to Food4Impact, the firm has disclosed investments of $15 million in oilseed processor AllSeeds and $15 million in leading Ukrainian animal feed producer Yednist.
Meanwhile, according to international professional services network Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), the €150 million ($177 million) Food4Impact fund alone matches the $170 million in mergers and acquisitions across Ukraine’s entire agricultural sector in 2021, before the invasion. Adjusted for cumulative US inflation since 2020, that is equivalent to approximately $210–212 million in 2025–2026.
DCP is raising a new equity-only fund that will also invest in agribusiness and technology but will target higher-risk investments than the Food4Impact mezzanine fund. A mezzanine fund provides a combination of debt and equity to companies unable to secure traditional bank financing.
Yakub explains that DCP invests where traditional banks cannot lend because of central bank regulations.
“Our mindset as equity investors helps us see what traditional commercial banks do not. From the first days or weeks of talking to an entrepreneur or a company, we can identify business opportunities that nobody else has seen before,” Yakub says.
What is Diligent Capital Partners?
DCP was founded in 2017 by Ukrainian Danylo Pasko and Ukrainian-American Mark Iwashko. According to their LinkedIn profiles, both graduated from Harvard Business School: Iwashko in 1991 and Pasko in 2010.
Both have long-standing ties to Horizon Capital, which manages seven funds with more than $1.8 billion in assets under management and invests in Ukraine’s leading technology companies. Iwashko was a founding partner of Horizon, while Pasko served as a senior partner and director from 2009 to 2013. Both left the company to establish their own fund.
DCP pursues a minority investment strategy. “For example, our stake in Preply is just 5%,” Yakub says. The focus on technology and agriculture was chosen because “these are Ukraine’s two most successful industries”. Like other equity funds in Ukraine, DCP draws 90% of its investment capital from international and local development agencies but always contributes 10% of its own money to have “skin in the game”.
How does the firm differ from its competitors, Dragon Capital and Horizon Capital? DCP also invests in technology, but neither Dragon Capital nor Horizon Capital focuses on agriculture.
“And I would not call them competitors. It is more a case of ‘co-opetition’ — cooperation plus competition. We will have plenty of work to do after the war ends,” Yakub said.
How Diligent Capital Partners invested in Preply
Online language-learning platform Preply was founded in 2012 by Ukrainians Serhii Lukianov, Kyrylo Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn. In July 2022, the company raised approximately $50 million in a Series C round led by investors including Owl Ventures, Hoxton Ventures and Diligent Capital. In 2023, it secured another $70 million in funding led by Horizon Capital.
The latest major milestone came in January 2026, when Preply completed a $150 million Series D funding round led by WestCap at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Existing investors, including Horizon Capital and the EBRD, also participated, bringing total funding to nearly $300 million and securing unicorn status for the Ukrainian-founded education technology company.
“Preply is a classic example of what Ukrainian entrepreneurs can achieve. We fully expected and believed that Kyrylo and Dmytro would succeed despite early mistakes, martial law and everything else. We knew they would work hard and reach their goal,” Yakub said, recalling how the investment in Preply began.
Pasko himself was the first investor. According to Yakub, the initial investments in Preply were “very risky” because the company “had no product at all, had nothing”. Ultimately, that trust paid off: the company became a leader in the language-learning market, and new investors, including the EBRD, subsequently provided funding.
“At some point, it became very difficult for Preply’s competitors to catch up, and it became the ‘go-to’ company... When the EBRD became an investor, we felt reassured — we saw that we had made a safe bet,” Yakub said.
Securing investment from WestCap will inevitably open the door to the company’s next step after achieving unicorn status: an initial public offering (IPO). An IPO is the process through which a private company sells shares to the public for the first time, “goes public” or lists on a stock exchange.
Many companies can pay investment banks to prepare them artificially for an IPO, but Preply is preparing organically. “They have brought in WestCap; now they will hire a new chief financial officer and strengthen their brand marketing — their users could become their public-market investors,” Yakub says.
Food4Impact: a joint investment initiative by Diligent Capital Partners and Dutch firm 2ndAries
Another major investment initiative announced in 2025, Food4Impact, is an agriculture-focused mezzanine fund. It was structured as a joint venture between Diligent Capital and Dutch partner 2Areas, building on more than a decade of cooperation with European development financiers. 2Areas was founded by former professionals from Dutch development bank FMO.
The initiative is supported by the Ukraine Facility, the EU’s flagship €50 billion ($58.6 billion) financial assistance instrument for Ukraine for 2024–2027. As the programme targets both macro-financial assistance and reconstruction, funding supports the budget under Pillar I and stimulates private investment under Pillar II.
Its launch was made possible by a €75 million ($87 million) guarantee under the Ukraine Facility. The guarantee underpins a structure that allows private investors, including commercial banks, to participate despite war-related risks that would otherwise be unacceptable to banks.
DCP’s 10-year partnership with 2Areas is the main factor behind the fund’s success. “We have invested in Ukraine together many times. We know them, and they know us. So by the time the Ukraine Facility came along, those relationships were already in place,” Yakub said.
To obtain the Ukraine Facility guarantee, the two funds engaged Cardano Development, which acts as an intermediary in negotiations with the European Commission to secure guarantees for investment funds. The €75 million guarantee was awarded to the two funds, bringing the size of the venture to €150 million. That was enough to attract another dozen Dutch investors to the newly established fund.
“There are a few things we cannot announce yet, but several more major institutional investors and other players will join this structure to complete it. I think that will include one large private bank in the Netherlands and another ten institutions,” Yakub said, adding that without the Ukraine Facility guarantee, these banks would not have been able to participate.
To deploy the capital raised, DCP will seek out small and medium-sized agricultural businesses, and “there are hundreds of companies we can already see”, he said. An eligible business might want to expand its land bank but lack access to bank credit, or it might be run by a proactive agricultural entrepreneur facing constraints on business lending. Companies unable to access bank financing because of severe war damage may also qualify. It does not matter whether they export or sell domestically.
“But they must be top of the class when it comes to compliance,” he added. Weak compliance is one of Ukraine’s key challenges, restricting market expansion and access to foreign investment. This applies not only to banks and investment funds but also to the International Monetary Fund: all emphasise that strong compliance is essential to securing financing.
The pressures of war are reshaping Ukrainian entrepreneurs’ resilience
At the very beginning of our conversation, Yakub asked to talk about the future and repeatedly returned to the subject, mentioning it 10 times. “We already have experience in two priority areas in which we are comfortable investing. I think the logical thing is to invest in the future,” he says.
People will always need food, while agriculture worldwide will face labour shortages. But what about new unicorns in Ukraine’s war-damaged economy? Other Ukrainian technology unicorns include airSlate, Creatio, GitLab, People.ai, Unstoppable Domains and Grammarly — companies that have been operating for an average of around a decade.
Yakub again expressed optimism, saying that potential candidates exist but have yet to become widely known. “We simply cannot see them clearly yet or fully identify them. But there are undoubtedly teams with the same enthusiasm and confidence that they will be just as successful as Preply’s founders,” he said.
His confidence rests on the resilience that the war has instilled in Ukrainian entrepreneurs, despite all the damage and losses: “It seems to me that many teams and founders have realised during the war that they can achieve a great deal with very limited resources under very difficult conditions.”
At the end of the interview, Dan Yakub stressed that building a successful business during a war is difficult, but it “requires a greater level of resilience, drive and inspiration than 90% of founders would ever experience in stable regions abroad”.
