G2A names CVC veteran Krzysztof Krawczyk as advisory board chair after taking minority stake

The digital marketplace with Polish origins, which has scaled to nearly $400m in annual GMV without external funding, brings in one of Central Europe’s most experienced private-equity operators to guide its next phase of M&A and global expansion.

After 16 years of organic growth, G2A is letting an outsider into the room.

The Polish-founded digital marketplace, which began life in 2010 as an online video-game store and has since grown into one of the world’s largest platforms for digital entertainment, said this week that Krzysztof Krawczyk has acquired a minority stake in the company and will become Chairman of its Advisory Board.

Until earlier this year, Krawczyk ran the Warsaw office of CVC Capital Partners, the global private-equity firm whose Polish portfolio he had built up over a decade. He is, by Central European standards, an unusual name to attach to a bootstrapped marketplace. That is precisely the point.

G2A frames the move as the next step in scaling an organisation that, by its own account, has reached institutional scale without ever raising outside capital.

The numbers behind the announcement

According to G2A, the marketplace now turns over an annual gross merchandise value of nearly $400m, with EBITDA above $20m and stable double-digit year-on-year growth. It serves more than 35 million users across 180 countries and recorded more than 200 million visits in 2025.

Software, gift cards, subscriptions, and e-learning, the company says, now account for nearly half of its business; the gaming-key trade that defined its first decade is no longer the whole story.

The disclosed financial profile is what private-equity operators tend to call EBITDA-positive growth at scale, the rarer kind of European internet business: profitable, large, and built without burning subsidised capital.

G2A says it is on track to exceed $1bn in GMV “within the next few years.” The release does not specify a timeline, but it is the first time the company has put a figure that ambitious in writing.

That, in turn, is what chooses between the advisor revealing.

Krzysztof Krawczyk’s track record is documented. CVC announced his appointment as Head of Poland in September 2015, when the firm opened its Warsaw office.

He had previously run Innova Capital, a leading Central European mid-market PE firm, and CVC’s own bio describes him as a Partner with close to 30 years of European private-equity experience, including board roles across telecoms, media, manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare in Central and Eastern Europe.

G2A’s release puts CVC’s assets under management at “over $180bn.” That figure undersells the firm at this point. CVC’s own Q1 2026 activity update reports €209bn in total AUM, with €151bn fee-paying. At current exchange rates, that is closer to $225bn. The scale of the manager Krawczyk built his career inside is, if anything, larger than the announcement implies.

What he brings to G2A is more specific than a number. Building businesses through acquisition, scaling them across borders, and preparing them for further capital phases is the operational craft of large-cap European private equity, and Krawczyk has done it for nearly three decades. G2A’s release identifies M&A as a priority.

The company says it is targeting EBITDA-positive acquisition candidates valued between $5m and $350m, particularly in Asia and in non-gaming digital categories. That is a wide band, and a deliberate one. It is the brief of an investor who intends to buy and integrate, not just to advise.

G2A is at pains to frame Krawczyk’s investment as a partnership rather than a handover. The company has, until now, remained family-office-controlled, with Bartosz Skwarczek continuing to play an active role as a member of the supervisory board.

The Advisory Board, of which Krawczyk now becomes Chairman, sits alongside Skwarczek as a strategic group rather than over him.

The plan, the release says, is to expand that board with international leaders across business, technology, and investment, an architecture more familiar from later-stage US technology companies than from European founder-run platforms.

That governance shift is, in some ways, the more telling part of the announcement. Companies that bring in heavyweight advisory boards tend to be doing so because they expect external scrutiny, whether from acquirers, partners, or eventually public-market investors, and want a credible structure ready when it arrives. G2A is not signalling an imminent IPO. It is signalling that the question is no longer hypothetical.

Alongside the M&A pitch, G2A is leaning into the language of 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 is genuine machine-learning infrastructure that any marketplace at G2A’s claimed scale would need to function.

The category G2A is reaching for, the agentic-commerce layer that startups like Paris-based Lemrock are building, is real and consequential, even if very early.

Krawczyk’s strategic value, as the release positions it, 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.

Where it points

The company’s hubs in Hong Kong and Amsterdam, alongside its Polish R&D centres, give it a footprint to push into Asia and beyond, the geography its release identifies as a primary direction of growth.

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 $1bn 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.