Ukrainian PE & VC Summit 2024: VC Panel Highlights

We are back to the Ukrainian PE & VC Summit highlights, focusing on the Venture Capital panel this time! Meet the speakers Łukasz Wawak, Sandra Golbreich, Roman Nikitov, and Mariusz Adamski who talked all about CEE VC and more. Let’s see the notes.

CEE reminds of New York in 2009: an emerging market with potential and top talent to look for. The region however lacks volume. Despite the large territory, the number of people living here is not that big. The specialists’ quality and education are bang-up, though: they are as good as in the US, but much cheaper and capital-efficient. But there’s a catch. To build a one-billion-dollar company in CEE, you have to move to other markets eventually and can’t stay domestic. The speakers’ opinion is that the CEE market is undervalued.

Continuing the CEE discussion, there’s enough money for the early stages, but not much for later ones (Series A and above). To grow, the teams need to ask for capital elsewhere, and overall startups in Poland face many of the same struggles as Ukrainians.

To fight this, capital from the government is needed. But that is only a part of the puzzle, as money doesn’t start anything, people do, like scientists and engineers. We should take the steps that Israel did and invest in technologies rather than markets. Most of the Israeli unicorns originated from the deep-tech field. On the other hand, if we want to elevate the region, R&D might not be enough. General verticals like marketplaces are not a bad start.

So, what Ukraine should change to keep startups inside rather than in Delaware? It’s complicated, but the panelists made several proposals. Let’s start with billions of VC dollars; improving the legislation, and transparency; cleaning legal burdens; and attaining geopolitical protection.

At the end of the panel, there was a reaction to the BRAVE1 initiative. One of the claims is that the government shouldn’t monopolize IPs, thus making defense and dual-use startups limited or unable to attract foreign investors. Such an approach might cripple the industry in the future.