Yorkville Advisors, a private equity firm that acts as investment adviser to structured equity financing specialist Cornell Capital Partners, has recruited Richard Brand as a managing dire
Yorkville Advisors, a private equity firm that acts as investment adviser to structured equity financing specialist Cornell Capital Partners, has recruited Richard Brand as a managing director and Jeff Treut as senior vice-president for corporate finance, as well as Michael J. Nowak as a managing director in its burgeoning technology investment group.
Brand will join the firm’s investment committee and will report directly to managing member Mark Angelo, while Treut will focus on deal origination and will report to managing director Troy Rillo.
‘The skill sets that Richard and Jeff bring to the firm with their combined 30-years of corporate finance experience will allow them to hit the ground running and enhance the robust deal origination platform that the firm has built since 2001,’ Angelo says.
Brand was most recently head of origination and managing director at Prospect Capital Management, a mezzanine and debt private equity firm focused on industrial and energy companies, and was previously a group head and managing director at France’s Caisse des Dépôts, where he structured financing transactions for communication, technology, energy and medical companies.
His experience includes a spell as managing director of the private placement business at Robertson Stephens, where he was also a member of the investment committee. Brand has structured and negotiated private equity deals at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, including Merrill’s first USD1bn deal.
Treut was most recently executive director of technology start-up GettingHired, where he developed a software programme to serve the recruiting needs of middle-market companies. Previously he was an analyst in the restructuring and reorganisation advisory group of the Blackstone Group, where he was responsible for developing valuation models, performed liquidity analyses and provided restructuring advice for various Blackstone investments.
Nowak most recently led the US IT investment office as general partner in a billion-dollar Euro-US venture fund, TVM Capital and has been a director of various early-stage hi-tech ventures in fields ranging from software to semiconductors.
He was previously co-founder of the Xerox Venture Lab at Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center and chief executive of many PARC spinouts, a vice-president for business development with an emerging hi-tech consulting practice at McKinsey, and manager of two USD100m investment programmes on behalf of the US Department of Commerce.
‘We are very excited to welcome Michael to our team,’ Angelo says. ‘The depth of his 25 years of experience in the technology business and as an international venture capitalist is a great complement to our investment banking team.’
Yorkville, which has headquarters in Jersey City and offices in London, Milan, San Diego and Jupiter, Florida, is the investment advisor to Cornell Capital Partners. Cornell was one of the most active US investors in terms of its number of structured equity financings last year, with more than USD800m in committed equity capital in more than 100 transactions in the US and worldwide.
