deal-origination
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Brian Pallas
Brian Pallas is the Italian founder and CEO of Opportunity Network, a private business-matching platform where vetted CEOs and investors anonymously connect on commercial, fundraising, investing and M&A deals above $1M. What started as an anonymous newsletter he circulated at Columbia Business School to help his father's Milan family business grew into one of the world's largest communities of CEOs and investors, with tens of thousands of vetted members across 130+ countries and hundreds of billions in transaction flow. A former Boston Consulting Group consultant with private equity and investment banking experience, Pallas also co-founded Collective Equity Ownership and the Milan real estate firm Medhelan Capital.
Rohan Doctor
Rohan Doctor is the founder and CEO of Louisa AI, a New York relationship-intelligence platform that spun out of Goldman Sachs in 2023. After 17 years at Goldman, where he ran the Bank Solutions business and closed a record cross-border trade he chalked up to a chance hallway encounter, he set out to answer one question: what if you could systematize serendipity with data? Louisa maps who-knows-who and who-knows-what inside an organization, then proactively nudges colleagues toward deals and warm introductions. The company raised a $5M seed in March 2024 backed by angels and Oxford University, and counts Goldman Sachs among its blue-chip financial-services customers.
Ali Dastjerdi
Ali Dastjerdi is the co-founder and CEO of Raylu, a New York AI company that turns an investor's thesis into booked founder meetings in minutes instead of weeks. A Harvard machine-learning student turned Insight Partners investor, he started Raylu in 2022 with his freshman-year roommate and a friend they met at AWS. The trio raised a $4M seed and an $8M Series A, and now sell their 'Deal Engineering' platform to 45-plus funds managing over $500 billion. They keep one unopened beer in the office fridge, to be drunk only the day the company dies.
Federico Baradello
Federico Baradello is the Founder and CEO of Finalis, an AI-powered investment banking platform he built from his frustration with a 30-year-old technology stack while executing M&A deals at Kirkland & Ellis. An Argentine-American multilingual attorney with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, LSE, and UC Berkeley, Baradello launched Finalis in 2020 and has grown it into one of the fastest-growing investment banking platforms in history - now powering over 900 bankers across 24 countries with $22.5B+ in closed transactions.