EP. 16
Raising a VC fund during wartime
Andrew Zinchuk·ZAS Ventures·Ukraine
About this episode
There are now multiple cohorts of Ukrainian founders who have raised, scaled, and exited during the full-scale war. The companies that get covered in Western press are usually the obvious ones — defence-tech, cybersecurity, satcom. The wave Andrew is most interested in is the boring one: SaaS, fintech, devtools, supply-chain. The companies that raise $1–3M seed rounds, ship product to global customers, and demonstrate that Ukrainian engineering and operating talent is competitive on its own terms — not just because of the political moment.
That’s the thesis behind ZAS Ventures, and it’s the lens this episode brings to bear on every other topic we cover: how LPs actually evaluate emerging-market managers, why the diaspora is doing so much of the routing of capital, and what the next two years of consolidation might look like.
The conversation is dense — write things down.
What you'll learn
- How to raise a fund when your target market is at war
- Why Ukrainian founders keep building under pressure
- What outsiders consistently miss about CEE resilience
- How reputation risk shapes capital flows into emerging markets
- The road to 30 Ukrainian unicorns
Chapters
Tap a row to jump in
“Resilience is not a slogan. It's an operating system.”
“The investors who win in this region are the ones who stayed when staying was the unpopular trade.”
Resources mentioned
About the guest
Andrew Zinchuk
Founder, ZAS Ventures · Ukraine
Andrew Zinchuk is the founder of ZAS Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on Ukrainian and CEE founders. Before launching ZAS he led product and corporate development across the region, and he writes regularly on resilience, fundraising, and the long arc of the Ukrainian startup ecosystem.
