G2A appoints CVC veteran Krzysztof Krawczyk as advisory board chair

After 16 years of organic, bootstrapped growth, the Polish-founded digital marketplace G2A is opening its doors to an outside investor and strategic leader for the first time. The company, which started in 2010 as a simple online video-game store and has evolved into a global platform for digital entertainment, announced this week that Krzysztof Krawczyk has acquired a minority stake and will assume the role of Chairman of its Advisory Board.

Krawczyk, who until earlier this year led the Warsaw office of global private-equity giant CVC Capital Partners, brings a rare pedigree to a company that has historically shunned external capital. By Central European standards, his appointment is a notable shift. That is precisely the intention.

G2A frames the move as a natural evolution for an organization that has reached institutional scale without raising outside funding. The company now reports an annual gross merchandise value (GMV) of nearly $400 million, with EBITDA exceeding $20 million and stable double-digit year-on-year growth. It serves over 35 million users across 180 countries and recorded more than 200 million visits in 2025.

The business has also diversified significantly. Software, gift cards, subscriptions, and e-learning now account for nearly half of its revenue, moving well beyond the gaming-key trade that defined its early years. This financial profile,EBITDA-positive growth at scale,is a rarity in the European internet space: profitable, large, and built without burning subsidized capital.

G2A says it is on track to exceed $1 billion in GMV within the next few years, marking the first time the company has publicly committed to such an ambitious target. That goal helps explain why Krawczyk was the right choice.

Krawczyk’s track record is well documented. CVC appointed him as Head of Poland in September 2015 when it opened its Warsaw office. He previously ran Innova Capital, a leading Central European mid-market private-equity firm. CVC’s own bio notes he has close to 30 years of European private-equity experience, with board roles across telecoms, media, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. While G2A’s release cites CVC’s assets under management at “over $180 billion,” the firm’s Q1 2026 update reports €209 billion in total AUM, closer to $225 billion at current exchange rates. The scale of the operation Krawczyk helped build is, if anything, larger than the announcement suggests.

What Krawczyk brings to G2A is more than a big number. His career has been defined by building businesses through acquisition, scaling them across borders, and preparing them for subsequent capital phases. That is the operational craft of large-cap European private equity, and G2A’s release identifies M&A as a primary strategic priority.

The company is targeting EBITDA-positive acquisition candidates valued between $5 million and $350 million, particularly in Asia and in non-gaming digital categories. That wide band is intentional. It signals an investor who intends to buy and integrate, not simply advise.

G2A is careful to frame Krawczyk’s investment as a partnership rather than a handover. The company remains family-office-controlled, with founder Bartosz Skwarczek continuing an active role on the supervisory board. The Advisory Board, which Krawczyk now chairs, sits alongside Skwarczek as a strategic group rather than above him. The plan is to expand that board with international leaders across business, technology, and investment, a governance structure more common at later-stage US technology companies than European founder-run platforms.

This governance shift is perhaps the most telling part of the announcement. Companies that bring in heavyweight advisory boards are typically preparing for external scrutiny, whether from acquirers, partners, or eventually public-market investors. G2A is not signalling an imminent IPO. It is signalling that the question is no longer hypothetical.

Alongside the M&A focus, G2A is leaning into artificial intelligence. The release describes an AI-native operational stack covering security, fraud prevention, marketing, customer service, content creation, and seller verification, with agentic AI being adopted to deliver personalised, co-created shopping experiences. Some of this infrastructure is necessary for any marketplace at G2A’s scale. The broader category,agentic commerce,is real and consequential, even if still early.

Krawczyk’s strategic value runs through both tracks. The M&A programme gives the technology stack more places to scale. The AI investments make the eventual portfolio more defensible. It is the kind of dual mandate that suits an operator who has spent his career turning regional businesses into international ones.

With hubs in Hong Kong and Amsterdam, alongside Polish R&D centres, G2A has a footprint to push into Asia and beyond, the geography its release identifies as a primary growth direction. The combination of profitable scale, family-office control, an experienced PE-trained chair, and a clearly stated M&A appetite is the kind of profile that tends to produce visible acquisitions over the next 18 to 24 months.

Whether G2A’s $1 billion GMV target arrives in two years or five will depend less on the announcement and more on what the company chooses to buy, integrate, and build in the meantime. Bringing in Krawczyk is the kind of move a founder makes when they are no longer trying to prove the model works. They are now trying to scale it past the founder.

“I have followed G2A for nearly eight years with great interest,” Krawczyk said. “It is among the most compelling digital platforms to emerge from Europe, with clear global potential.” The next chapter, by his own description, is about unlocking it.