These are the private equity funds hiring junior investment bankers now

Investment banks are just wrapping up their 2018 graduate recruitment programmes, but private equity firms rarely follow a strict schedule when it comes to hiring juniors. Buy-side firms without grad schemes target junior bankers months into their sell-side career, and bring them on board whenever they have a need to extra resources.

As a result, junior bankers have been landing at PE firms in the past few months, at a time when most firms are locking down on new hires and budgeting for the year ahead. These are the private equity firms in London hiring in juniors now.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund

Softbank’s Vision Fund is a tech-focused venture capital vehicle focused on technology investments, which, at $93bn, dwarfs any of its peers. Deutsche Bank’s former head of credit trading, Rajeev Misra, is at the helm and has recruited some former investment banking heavy hitters into its investment team. More recently, it’s been recruiting juniors from investment banks. As we reported last week, Paul Davison, an associate at Rothschild, joined in October. This follows Louis Cho, who came from J.P. Morgan in the summer.

Cerberus Capital Management

Again, Cerberus has been making some hires at the top of the tree – most notably, J.P. Morgan’s AI guru Afsheen Afshar, who joined earlier this month as a senior managing director and chief artificial intelligence officer.

But it’s also been poaching from banks for its junior ranks. In a rare hire for its London office, Robert Hansen, who spent two years within Goldman Sachs’ financial institutions group M&A team, joined in October. He has an MSc in Finance from Imperial College London.

Summit Partners

Summit is a PE firm established in 1984, which focuses on technology, healthcare and “growth products”. It also, this year at least, has a predilection for hiring juniors from Goldman Sachs. Nik Ohri, who worked in Goldman’s leveraged finance team for only a year before jumping to Summit earlier this month, is the latest recruit. It also brought in Matt Heims, a former Goldman consumer banking analyst, in May.

Westbrook Partners

The real estate focused private equity firm, Westbrook Partners, doesn’t hire many people in London, but it’s just tapped J.P. Morgan for its latest recruit. Vibhav Sajjan, the former president of Imperial College’s investment society who spent just over a year within J.P. Morgan’s real estate finance division, joined as an analyst earlier this month.

Metric Capital Partners

Metric Capital Partners targets investments in small to medium sized companies in Europe. This year it has been targeting both boutique investment banks and bigger players. Tijana Copic, a former investment banking associate at Greenhill & Co who spent over four years at the bank in London, joined as an investment associate earlier this month. She follows Miro Angelov, a former industrials and TMT analyst at Goldman Sachs, who joined Metric’s special situations fund as an associate in May.

It also hired Erwin Molenaar, a former managing director at Barclays investment bank and senior advisor at Richmond Park Partners, who joined its investment team in July.

Rede Partners

Rede Partners is not a private equity fund, but instead advises buy-side firms on fundraisings. Nonetheless, it’s been poaching from investment banks. Ed Saunders, a debt capital markets analyst at Barclays for the past two years, joined as an analyst earlier this month.

CapVest Partners

This mid-market private equity firm has also been hiring from boutiques. It brought in Vishal Luhana, an analyst at Houlihan Lokey, into its investment team focused on consumer, healthcare and business services.

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