Ukrainian PE & VC Summit 2025: M&A Panel Highlights

We open up this week with the M&A panel breakdown, which was featured at the 2nd Ukrainian PE & VC Summit. Please, meet the speakers Nadiia Kaznacheieva, Brian Best, Leonid Kyrian, Roman Nikitov, John C. Patton, and Denys Sychkov, who have brought all the latest news from the market.

In Ukraine, the M&A market is becoming increasingly difficult. One of the big obstacles is currency control, as capital resembles a hostage. You simply can not take the liquidity out, hence limiting the deals to domestic ones. Such a situation definitely fuels the internal M&A market, but the thing is, not many companies are willing to receive hryvna instead of hard currency, hence closing the deals is still tough.

In the past, it took a year on average to conclude an M&A transaction, while now the good timeframe is 2–3 years.

The key bottleneck is finding the right businesses. If we want to make Ukraine attractive to foreign funds, we need to figure out how to open public and debt markets for companies.

The war accelerated the Ukrainian companies' looking for geographical expansion, although it’s worth mentioning that the process had started even before that. For big corporations with money, international M&A deals provide options to attract funding, like loan financing. But because it’s difficult to collateralise Ukrainian property, even these tools have limitations.

Invasion has shifted investors' profiles. Unfortunately, conservative and strategic players with a long-term buy-and-hold approach are not interested in Ukraine any more. Even if the people are not necessarily after a bargain, there’s not enough predictability to justify the transaction.

Unless buyers are already on the ground with a strong local management team and bags of local currency—hryvna—there is not much interest in Ukraine from foreigners. For them, starting from scratch is unlikely.

The outlook for 2025 is positive, though, as speakers agree on the eventual future growth of M&A activity. The most promising sectors are agriculture, IT-related businesses, energy, logistics, and infrastructure. The possibility of miltech M&A is also on the table.

Interesting notes: rare minerals are not that great of a deal in comparison to industrial ones because of the high CapEx. There is a lot of privatisation activity in the field of industrial minerals, namely, stone, coal, and clay. In other words, all the stuff that could be used in Ukraine’s reconstruction.

The second Ukrainian PE & VC Summit was organised by UVCA in joint efforts with the Polish Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (PSIK), ICU Ventures, Google for Startups Warsaw and Rymarz Zdort Maruta. Technical partner — DreamX.