Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund forms preliminary list of projects
The Ukrainian investment group Dragon Capital and the British Amber Infrastructure, which will jointly manage the Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund with a target size of EUR350 million, have formed a reliable portfolio of projects over the past year that can absorb even more capital than the fund plans to attract, said Managing Director, Head of Infrastructure at Dragon Capital Yevhen Baranov.
"In any market, the three pillars of our strategy are energy, transport and digital infrastructure. All three sectors are in dire need of new investments, and each of them requires a lot of capital," he said at a workshop at the Ukrainian Recovery Conference URC2025 in Rome, dedicated to private equity investments.
Baranov emphasized that this is the first fund on the market whose strategy is focused specifically on infrastructure. As part of its preparation, Dragon Capital, with its accumulated experience in the Ukrainian market, found an international partner - Amber Infrastructure with assets under management of over EUR35 billion, which specializes in infrastructure projects.
He added that this strategy would not be successful without the support of international financial institutions, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB), the IFC and a number of European international financial institutions.
As noted at URC2025 in the presentation of the fund being created, its strategy involves investments in controlling stakes or co-investment with like-minded people, with an average ticket size of EUR20 million to EUR50 million.
As reported, the EBRD and the EIB plan to contribute EUR60 million and EUR40 million, respectively, to the capital of the new Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund I. The EIB noted at the end of June that the project is at the assessment stage, while the EBRD board of directors plans to consider it on September 24 of this year.
Baranov stressed that the first project of the Amber Dragon Ukraine Infrastructure Fund was announced at URC2025 – the Power One distributed energy project, to which the EBRD plans to provide EUR21.1 million in financing.
“During negotiations with various investors, we obviously face risks, since infrastructure is a sector with a large share of assets that are physically concentrated in one place. Therefore, risk insurance mechanisms are obviously one of the most necessary things,” Baranov noted, among other things.
According to him, while international financial institutions and development institutions are ready to consider infrastructure projects, meetings with potential private partners have shown that without first-loss guarantee mechanisms, it will be very difficult to consider investments in capital-intensive industries.
Baranov welcomed the launch of the European Flagship Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine with a volume of EUR500 million, aimed at stimulating private investment through first-loss guarantees. At the same time, the representative of Dragon Capital expressed some concern that this initiative may create a certain imbalance in access to this capital for the ecosystem as a whole.
The presentation emphasizes that the fund will focus on new, utility-scale energy projects aimed at replacing severely damaged and technologically obsolete electricity generation facilities with new renewable energy capacity, as well as on system balancing infrastructure to ensure a reliable and clean energy supply to the Ukrainian economy.
In the field of digital infrastructure, the fund plans to work with distributed telecommunications assets, such as telecommunications towers, fiber-optic networks and data centers, supporting the growth of the country's digital economy.
In the transport sector, the fund will focus on logistics centers, ports and private railway infrastructure assets.