ICU Ventures

Roman Nikitov has more than15 years of experience in investment banking and corporate finance.  He joined the ICU team from UniCredit, where he was heading the Corporate Finance Advisory team in Ukraine. Prior to that, he served as a director in ING’s corporate finance team.

During his time at UniCredit and ING, Roman led and took part in significantly contributed to a number of major transactions. These included a private placement of Ukraine’s largest pharmaceuticals wholesaler, a leveraged buy-out and follow-on capital raise for one of the largest alcohol producers in Ukraine, the acquisition of a large Ukrainian hard cheese producer as well as a number of public offerings on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, among which was Ukraine’s largest vegetable oil producer.

Prior to joining ING, Roman worked at Ernst & Young in the audit department in Kyiv Kyiv from 1999 to 2003. In 2003, he moved before moving to the corporate finance department in Moscow to focus on M&A, project finance, and restructuring projects. He returned to Kyiv in 2005 to lead Ernst & Young’s Transaction Support department., executing financial analysis, pre-acquisition due-diligence and IPO documentation projects.

Roman received a BBA degree in Enterprise and IT Management from International Christian University (Kyiv-Vienna) in 1999. He qualified as a chartered certified accountant in 2002 (ACCA) and completed Executive Leadership Development Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2019.

Roman speaks English, Ukrainian, Russian and has basic Polish skills.

Giles Farley co-leads ICU's technology and venture capital investment activities. He also serves on the board of Synbias Pharma Ag, a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer.

From 2013 to 2014, he served as interim CFO/COO for a distressed Prague-based real estate investment fund with over 100 employees and a diverse portfolio of residential and commercial assets in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Before that, he was a director at ARTA Investment Partners, a Kiev-based boutique investment bank, completing transactions exceeding $1bn in value. He has also worked at Citibank, where he managed a $14 bn liability portfolio in Germany, as well as at the Boston Consulting Group and Dialogue Capital, a long-short, event-driven hedge fund in New York.

He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles.