Entrepreneur | Strategic Advisor | Investor | Mentor

After nearly two decades across 50+ countries, five continents and seven industries, Valeriya Zaychuk has built her career around one discipline Global Business Development and one main question: Where does the next opportunity for growth come from?

Today, she is a serial entrepreneur, Strategic Advisor, investor, AI builder, mentor and public speaker. But the roots of this vision go back much further.

Born in Donetsk, Ukraine, Valeriya lost her father, a successful entrepreneur, when she was eight. Before he died, on her sixth birthday, he told her that one day she would study in Oxford, live in London, travel the world, close million-dollar deals and have her own successful global company. He said it with such conviction and confidence that she believed him, decided to pursue this path and carried the vision with her.

Zaychuk started working early, at 16, while studying for her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in International Economics at DonNTU in Donetsk, Ukraine. She later did indeed study in Oxford, at Oxford Media Business School, completing her CIM qualification, and pursued an MSc in Marketing at Heriot-Watt University while living and working in London, UK.

Early Career Lessons

She started her career in the luxury industry — fine jewellery, Swiss watches, fancy-coloured diamonds and fine art — working with high-net-worth clients. It taught her a lesson that stayed with her forever: in high-value business, the product is very important, but building trust and reputation matters even more.

At 23, she opened her first Business Development consultancy without fully understanding what Business Development meant, but with a great passion for supporting founders, whom she has always called “the builders of this world”.

At 25, she moved into the renewable energy sector and represented a US biomass gasification company in Ukraine. That was her first experience of the challenges successful international companies face when entering new markets. She quickly learned that global expansion requires local knowledge, local strategic partnerships and a clear understanding of local culture and business practices.

At 26, she joined DTEK, one of the largest energy holdings in Ukraine, as the group was building a new green-energy direction through its first wind farm. Working alongside senior leadership, board directors and international strategic partners gave her an incredible opportunity to learn and gain early exposure to what it takes to build a new business within a corporation from the ground up.

At 28, she moved into the commodities sector. In London, she joined Metal Bulletin, a century-old British business now known as Fastmarkets, where she managed a portfolio of 80 key accounts across CIS markets and Switzerland, working with major global groups including Trafigura, Glencore, Gunvor, MRI, Severstal, Rusal, Evraz, Gazprom, Metinvest and Naftogaz.

This was the moment when Business Development became a strategic discipline for Zaychuk.

“I have never seen Business Development as sales alone. For me, it’s about understanding where the market is going, what both sides want and need, and creating opportunities where both parties can win and succeed through trust and long-term relationships.”

At 30, she left a highly paid corporate Business Development role in the City of London to pursue her lifelong dream, building her own global company. She joined the startup world as a freelancer to explore the blockchain revolution and innovative technologies.

Valeriya Zaychuk Learning Through Change

Zaychuk’s career has repeatedly moved with major economic and technological waves: renewable energy and the carbon credits movement, commodities and global market expansion, the blockchain revolution in 2017, and now the artificial intelligence wave.

She also learned through downturns. Over two decades, she experienced the 2008–09 financial crisis, multiple crypto winters, COVID and two wars in her homeland, Ukraine, beginning in 2014 and 2022.

She lived in Ukraine, spent 14 years in London, UK, and the last five years in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, while spending more than a decade on planes, travelling and working across 50 countries to grow, build and scale businesses at different stages, corporations, SMEs and startups.

For her, resilience and inner strength became not just about fighting through challenges, but about continuous self-development, taking responsibility for finding solutions and new opportunities for growth regardless of the circumstances, and always continuing to move towards them.

Web3 Era

The world of Web3 and blockchain technology became a brutal teacher, taking Zaychuk’s global Business Development experience to another level.

She worked with fast-growing, fast-moving and constantly changing startups, helping them scale and grow globally — initially as a freelancer and later through her own agency and SaaS platform.

Web3 also brought Zaychuk closer to venture capital, family offices, investors and LPs. Working with investment funds and VCs across Silicon Valley, New York, London and Switzerland showed her that fundraising ultimately depends on how fundable you are as a business.

From VZIONER to Strategic Advisory

In 2019, Zaychuk founded VZIONER, her own global Business Development agency, where she supported more than 100 projects with international expansion, strategic partnerships and investment readiness.

Alongside this, she built her own strong network of trusted service providers across five continents and a network of VCs across the globe.

In 2023, when the Web3 market experienced another crash and founders were desperately looking for funding to stay alive, she saw both an opportunity and a core problem: most founders were simply not ready to be funded.

With her knowledge, network and understanding of what it takes to become investment-ready, she decided to build a new venture: GetFunded.Network.

Before the launch, Zaychuk conducted her own research and interviewed 300 VCs about how they evaluated companies and which KPIs and criteria mattered to them. This is how she developed her own IR Index, the Investment Readiness framework for GetFunded.Network.

Over two and a half years, she developed an entire ecosystem around global Business Development, investment readiness and fundraising, bringing together 1,000+ companies under one brand: 50+ top industry mentors, around 100 professional service providers and approximately 500 venture capital firms.

Hundreds of founders participated in its VC Audits, Demo Days and educational programmes.

But by 2025, the Web3 and global VC markets had changed drastically. Capital had shifted towards later-stage investments and OTC deals, AI hype had entered the game, and rebuilding GetFunded for another market would have required another few years.

Zaychuk chose to close it instead.

It reinforced another lesson: knowing when to pivot is a skill. Knowing when to stop requires wisdom. And a business can succeed only as long as its founder has the enthusiasm and willingness to carry on.

Today, Valeriya Zaychuk acts as a Strategic Advisor, advising companies at critical points of transition — growth ceilings, entering new markets, capital readiness, business-model shifts, AI transformation or any other situation where strategic change is needed.

Her advantage, she says, is pattern recognition. Seeing similar business problems across different industries, countries, economic cycles and stages of development has taught her to approach situations with a creative, outside-the-box mindset.

“People who spend decades in one industry may not always see the strategies, processes, opportunities and solutions available in others. I can mix and match what I have learned across industries and bring a completely new perspective and new solutions to the table.”

Living in the UAE has added another layer of wisdom and inspiration, particularly around how infrastructure can create resilience and provide solid foundations for long-term economic growth and opportunities for future generations.

Building Business in the AI Era

Alongside advisory, Zaychuk is developing her investment portfolio through Fundelity Capital and has also started building an AI product around her beloved field of Business Development.

She sees AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a force multiplier. The objective is not to create another AI product that will do all the work for founders, there are already plenty of those! Instead, she wants to build something that will help them develop their own business muscle and make better business decisions.

Her upcoming book, How to BizDev, and her LinkedIn newsletter carry the same mission, translating nearly two decades of global Business Development into practical strategies and frameworks for the next generation of founders.

For Zaychuk, sustainable companies are ultimately built by people capable of understanding their markets, creating value for others, building meaningful win-win relationships, adapting through difficult times and repeatedly finding the next source of growth.

That is what Business Development means to her.

“We only grow by helping others to grow.” — Valeriya Zaychuk

Follow Valeriya Zaychuk in her LinkedIn & Instagram

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