UK-based Blue Lake VC has secured a cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank, the UK’s largest institutional investor in venture capital.
Ukrainians David Gilgur and Lyubov Guk, founding partners of Blue Lake VC, are backing exceptional immigrant founders in the UK. Immigrants are behind more than half of the UK's fastest-growing companies.
But according to proprietary survey data from Blue Lake of over 1,200 immigrant founders, more than 90 per cent say they can't access the networks or capital they need at the earliest stages. Gilgur and Guk know this exact problem firsthand as immigrant entrepreneurs and see a gap and an opportunity that Blue Lake VC is addressing.
Over the past six years, David Gilgur and Lyubov Guk have been laying the foundations of Blue Lake VC. What started as angel investing and the Blue Lake Syndicate, with hands-on support for founders, has grown into Oasis, the largest international founder community and hub in London. The fund brings it all together.
Blue Lake VC was born out of its founders' first-hand experience of the outstanding opportunities the UK tech scene offers and the importance of support and networks at the early stage. It writes the first institutional cheque for early-stage international founders building global products. Both partners are originally from Ukraine. Gilgur ’s unlikely VC career began when he came to the UK as a child to study at a Jewish Orthodox school, which led to a career in Economics and Data at Bloomberg. In 2014, as the revolution and the first Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he founded a consultancy to build bridges between Eastern European businesses and the UK market.
