Leading Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital made investments of nearly $100 million in 2025, but did not manage to complete all of them, Dragon Capital founder Tomas Fiala said.
“Last year, we approached the pre-war level of new investments, which was over $100 million,” he said during a discussion at the Center for Economic Strategy on Friday dedicated to the main trends of the year for the Ukrainian economy.
Fiala noted that in the first two years of the war, the task was to preserve the business, restore it after the fall in 2022, and complete all capital investments that had been started before the war.
“Well, the last two years have been about expanding the business. We can no longer wait to make decisions ‘after the war’; it already takes a long time to wait for the war to end,” explained the head of Dragon Capital.
“And this year, we plan to do even more,” he emphasized.
Fiala noted that the growth plans are linked to the creation of two private equity funds — Rebuild Ukraine Fund (REBUF) and Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I (in partnership with the British company Amber Infrastructure) — which the company has been actively working on for the past year and a half. The target volumes of these funds are $250 million and $350 million, respectively, and Dragon Capital’s contribution to each of them is $20 million.
The head of the company specified that the first closing of REBUF with a volume of $102.5 million took place on Friday, while the announcement of the first significant closing of Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I is expected next week.
Fiala added that Dragon Capital, together with Amber Infrastructure, was selected as the winner of the competition to manage the EU Flagship Fund for Reconstruction of Ukraine with a declared volume of EUR 220 million among 12 applicants, four of which made it to the final.
According to him, Dragon Capital is ready to invest EUR40 million of its own funds in this fund, and other investors, as in the two previous funds, are five European IFIs (International Financial Institutions) and DFIs (Development Financial Institutions).
“We are currently in the process of due diligence… We plan to start investing in the middle of next year,” Fiala said. He stressed that none of these funds have restrictions on investments in physical assets.
Regarding the challenges faced by Dragon Capital’s businesses in 2025, the head of the company noted that there was no significant difference from previous years, with security risks remaining in first place.
According to him, more significant risks related to the rule of law were added in the summer, when the company suspended all investments for about three weeks during an attack on anti-corruption agencies.
“It felt like we had returned to the days of Yanukovych and authoritarian rule in the country, and we only resumed investments after the Verkhovna Rada and the president corrected their mistake and waited for the government to appoint the head of the BEB,” Fiala said.
He added that there were also cyberattacks on the company and that there are still challenges with labor resources.
“We estimate that the employee shortage is at 20%, which is about 2 million people.
Salaries are growing by 20-25% per year and are higher in currency terms than they were before the war,” the head of Dragon Capital described the situation.
At the same time, according to him, most businesses are growing faster than inflation, at 10% to 20% or even more, although expenses are also growing rapidly.
“It is difficult for us to maintain the same business margins in our budgets for the 26th year that we had in the last two years, which were basically not bad,” Fiala stated.
