As the buzz around reconstruction continues, Ukraine needs more private equity funds to spark the investment ecosystem – especially for businesses where traditional banking cannot provide loans due to regulatory constraints, Diligent Capital Partners (DCP) senior partner and chief operating officer (COO) Dan Yakub tells Kyiv Post.
The Ukrainian private equity firm invested in Preply – a global IT company with Ukrainian founders, in the latest round that made it the seventh unicorn with Ukrainian roots – and launched the €150 million ($177 million) Food4Impact fund with Dutch fund 2ndAries agricultural fund.
National investment organizations and international financial organizations are ready to take risks and invest in Ukraine despite wartime, with a political mission to invest in Ukraine now whilst there are comparatively fewer players in the market.
“Even if you’re insured [from war risks], it doesn’t always save you. One of the enterprises we invested in organized its own fire rescue service, but even this preparation didn’t work, and some of the assets were destroyed [from Russia’s attack]. As investors in Ukraine, we simply have to live with these risks,” Yakub says.
Even though investing in Ukraine is risky, foreign investment organizations deploy hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukrainian investment funds to boost future rebuilding. This is an additional stream of capital beyond traditional banking, such as grants and banking guarantees. Over 2025-2026, international financial institutions started investing in Ukraine’s reconstruction, also through Ukraine’s leading investment funds.
The International Financial Corporation (IFC) announced an equity investment of up to €5 million in Flyer One Ventures Fund V. Ukraine’s leading private equity firm Horizon Capital has raised €150 million ($173 million) as part of the Catalyst Fund from IFC, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and North European development agencies in 2026. Dragon Capital also raised two funds from global and local IFIs: the Rebuild Ukraine Fund (REBUF) and the Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I.
“The sooner more players appear, the better. Even if we don’t build enterprises, every job is an investment in salaries, working capital, and offices. It’s tens of thousands of dollars to create one job and tens of billions of dollars to create one million jobs there,” Yakub tells Kyiv Post.
Diligent Capital Partners invests in Ukrainian entrepreneurs so that they can build companies “wherever they decide to be successful,” as Yakub explains the DCP’s mission.
DCP’s portfolio is split between the so-called “asset light” investments in tech companies and “asset heavy” investments that now comprise Ukraine’s mid-sized agricultural companies. The sum of $16 million in Preply and $7 million in the Philippines-based neobank Tonik are publicly disclosed tech investments. In agriculture, apart from Food4Impact, the company disclosed $15 million investments in the oilseeds processor AllSeeds and $15 million in the leading Ukrainian feed producer Yednist’ Group.
Meanwhile, the €150 million ($177 million) Food4Impact fund alone is the same volume as $170 million of merger and acquisition (M&A) deals across Ukraine’s entire agricultural sector in 2021, before the invasion, according to KPMG figures. This is equivalent to roughly $210–212 million in 2025–26 dollars adjusted for cumulative US inflation since 2020.
DCP is raising a new purely equity fund that will also invest in agro and tech, but is taking aim at riskier investments than the mezzanine Food4Impact fund. (A mezzanine fund provides a mix of loans and equity to companies that cannot secure traditional bank financing).
Yakub explains that DCP invests where traditional banks cannot due to central bank regulations.
“Our equity investor mindset helps us see what traditional commercial banks cannot see. And from the very first days or weeks of communication with an entrepreneur or a company, we can see business cases that no one else has seen before,” Yakub tells Kyiv Post.
What is Diligent Capital Partners
DCP was founded in 2016 by Ukrainians Dan Yakub and Dan Pasko, and an American with Ukrainian origins, Mark Iwashko. Both graduated from Harvard Business School, Iwashko in 1991 and Pasko in 2010, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Despite the long time-frame, both are closely tied to Horizon Capital, which manages seven funds with assets under management of over $1.8 billion and invests in Ukraine’s leading tech companies. Iwashko became Horizon’s founding partner, and Pasko worked as a senior associate and principal from 2009 to 2013. They both left the firm to set sail for their fund.
DCP uses the minority-investment strategy, Yakub explains. “For example, our stake in Preply is just 5%,” he says. The focus on tech and agro was chosen because, as he put it, “these two industries are the most successful in Ukraine”. Like their other equity funds in Ukraine, DCP allocated 90% for investments from international and local development agencies, Yakub says, but DCP always invests 10% from its own wallet to have the “skin in the game.”
What makes them different from their competitors, Dragon Capital and Horizon Capital? Although DCP also invests in tech, neither Dragon Capital nor Horizon Capital focus on agriculture.
“And I wouldn’t call them competitors, it’s more of a ‘co-petition’ – cooperation plus competition. We have a lot of work to do after the war ends,” Yakub told Kyiv Post.
How Diligent Capital Partners invested in Preply
Online language learning platform Preply was founded in 2012 by Ukrainians Serge Lukianov, Kirill Bigai, and Dmytro Voloshyn. In July 2022, the company raised about $50 million in a Series C led by investors including Owl Ventures, Hoxton Ventures and Diligent Capital. In 2023, it secured another $70 million under Horizon Capital’s leadership.
The most recent milestone came in January 2026, when Preply closed a $150 million Series D round led by WestCap at a $1.2 billion valuation, with participation from existing backers such as Horizon Capital and the EBRD, bringing total capital raised to nearly $300 million and securing unicorn status for the Ukrainian-founded edtech.
“Preply is a classic example of what Ukrainian entrepreneurs can be like. It was entirely our expectation and vision that Kirill and his co-founder Dmytro would be successful despite their initial mistakes, despite martial law and despite basically everything. We knew they would persevere and achieve their goal,” Yakub told Kyiv Post, recalling how investing in Preply began.
Pasko himself became the first angel investor. Yakub describes how early investments in Preply were “very risky” because the company was “completely without a product, with nothing”. But eventually the trust paid off: the company became the market leader in language learning, then new investors allocated financing, including the EBRD.
“At some point, it became very difficult for Preply’s competitors to catch up and they became a ‘top-of-mind feature’... When EBRD became an investor, we relaxed that we made a safe bet,” Yakub told Kyiv Post.
Securing investments from WestCap will inevitably open doors to the company’s next step after reaching a unicorn status – Initial Public Offering (IPO), Yakub told Kyiv Post. (An IPO is the process where a private company first sells shares to the public, “goes public” or “lists” on a stock exchange).
Many companies can pay investment banks and become ready for IPO artificially, but Preply is getting ready for it organically, he says. “They attracted WestCap, now they will hire a new CFO and strengthen their brand marketing – their audience can become their public investors.”
Food4Impact – a joint investment by Diligent Capital Partners and Dutch 2ndAries
The other large investment announced in 2025 – Food4Impact, an agri-focused mezzanine debt fund – was structured as a joint venture between Diligent Capital and Dutch partner 2ndAries, drawing on more than a decade of cooperation with European development financiers. 2ndAries was founded by former professionals from FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank.
It is backed by the Ukraine Facility, the EU’s €50 billion ($58.6 billion) flagship financial assistance instrument for Ukraine for 2024-2027. Since the program is aimed at both macrofinancial assistance and reconstruction efforts, the cash is directed both to the budget under Pillar I and also covers private investment incentives under Pillar II.
Its launch was made possible by a €75 million ($87 million) guarantee under the Ukraine Facility, which acts as a backbone for the structure, allowing private investors – including commercial banks – to participate despite war-related risks that would otherwise be unbankable.
DCP has a 10-year partnership with 2Areas – the key secret to the fund’s success, Yakub told Kyiv Post. “We have invested in Ukraine with them many times. We know them, and they know us. And so, by the time the Ukraine Facility appeared, these relationships had already been established,” he says.
To get the Ukraine Facility’s guarantee, both funds asked for services of Cardanа Development that works as a negotiator with the European Commission to obtain the guarantee for the investment fund. The €75 million guarantee was given to both funds, thus making it a €150-million venture – but Yakub explains that it was enough to attract a dozen more Dutch investors in the established fund.
“There are a few things that we cannot announce yet, but there will be several more large institutional investors and players who will join this structure in order to make it complete. I think it will be one large private bank in the Netherlands and ten more,” he told Kyiv Post. If not for the Ukraine Facility’s guarantee, these banks could not have joined the investments, he added.
To allocate the raised investment, DCP will look for small and medium-sized agro enterprises, and there are “hundreds of companies that we can already see,” Yakub says. One example of such an eligible enterprise can be an entity that wants to enlarge its land bank but cannot get access to the bank loan; or where a company is led by an active agro-entrepreneur who faces the limits of B2B bank loans. Enterprises that cannot get access to banks because they got severe war damage, can also fit. And it doesn’t matter whether they are export-oriented or sell to domestic markets, Yakub told Kyiv Post.
“But they should be excellent students in compliance,” he added. Low compliance is one of the key issues for Ukraine, locking the scaling of market players and access to foreign investments. This not only concerns banks or funds, but also the International Monetary Fund – all of them say top compliance is the key for firms to get financing.
Pressure of the war reshapes the stamina of Ukraine’s entrepreneurs
From the beginning of our conversation, Yakub asked to talk about the future – and constantly returned to this topic, mentioning it 10 times during the interview. “We already have a track record of two priorities we comfortably invest in. I think this will be logical, hopefully, the end of the war and investing in the future,” he says.
And while people still want to eat, even though the agro sector will face a declining population around the world – what about new unicorns in Ukraine’s war-battered economy? Other Ukrainian tech unicorns include AirSlate, Creatio, GitLab, People.ai, Unstoppable Domains and Grammarly – companies that have existed for a decade on average.
Yakub is again optimistic that the potential candidates are simply not public yet, but that they are out there somewhere. “We just can’t see them clearly yet and can’t fully recognize them. But there are definitely teams with the same enthusiasm and confidence that they will be as successful as the founders of Preply,” he says.
His confidence is anchored in the stamina that the war gave to Ukrainian entrepreneurs, despite all damage and losses. “It seems to me that many teams and founders during the war understand that they can do a lot with very limited resources in very difficult conditions,” he says.
Building a successful business in wartime conditions is hard, but it “requires a higher level of stamina, hunger, and inspiration than 90% of founders would never go through in stable geographies abroad.”