Founded by entrepreneurs Oleg Gorokhovskyi and Mykhaylo Rogalskyi, the Fintech-IT Group sits behind one of Ukraine’s most widely used consumer apps. Monobank is the country’s largest neobank and the No. 2 retail bank overall; it counted 9.9 million clients as of September 2025. UMAEF frames the investment as both a growth play and a vote of confidence in Ukraine’s tech capacity amid wartime.
The deal is notable for who is writing the check. UMAEF — formerly Western NIS Enterprise Fund — was created by the U.S. Congress in 1994 and financed with $150 million in U.S. government funding. Over three decades it has invested about $190 million in 143 companies in Ukraine and Moldova, which the fund says helped unlock roughly $2.4 billion of follow-on capital. The board is chaired by Dennis A. Johnson, with Jaroslawa Z. Johnson as president and CEO. The rebranded fund remains a Delaware corporation governed by U.S. business executives.
“With this investment, UMAEF is expanding its existing portfolio of FinTech investments made through u.ventures, investing in a local leader launched and grown by best-in-class Ukrainian founders,” said Jaroslawa Z. Johnson. “Fintech-IT Group is a striking example of this strategy, achieving outstanding results in Ukraine’s financial services sector, and leading in technological advancement and customer satisfaction.”
For Ukraine’s startup scene, the timing matters as much as the price tag. Large growth rounds have been rare since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. UMAEF’s move signals that U.S.-linked capital is still prepared to underwrite Ukrainian growth stories with a path to international markets. UMAEF explicitly cast the deal as a way to “provide comfort for other major U.S. investors” and floated a potential listing on a U.S. exchange as the company scales — an ambition echoed in local coverage.
Fintech-IT Group is a holding that includes Fintech Band (the original monobank developer), Kbyte1024, AC DC Processing, and Shake-to-Pay, and it supplies core software to Universal Bank, which issues monobank cards. The company also supports tens of thousands of SMEs with tools to accept digital payments, a growing area as monobank expands from consumer finance into acquiring and merchant services. In August, monobank began rolling out its own network of payment terminals, a step toward a fuller small-business stack.
Co-founder Rogalskyi told Ukrainian tech outlet AIN that new capital will go into the “mono” product ecosystem, “primarily in the development of the marketplace and solutions for entrepreneurs.”
With the new funding, Fintech-IT Group plans to expand its product suite, including financing and business services for SMEs, strengthening its mission to deliver advanced digital banking solutions to millions of Ukrainians.
