Conviction we earned.
We invest where our own market work gives us an edge, usually in sectors where Nfluence runs transactions every year. If we cannot explain our advantage in a sentence, it is a pass.
MERCHANT BANKING
We advise on a lot of companies.
We invest in a few.
Nfluence has run 250 transactions since 2006. That work puts our bankers in front of hundreds of companies a year, in real processes, with real diligence and real buyer feedback. A small number of them are so good that advising is not the most interesting thing we could do.
Those are the ones we back with our own capital.
Merchant banking at Nfluence is the natural consequence of running an investment bank well. We see the market from inside live transactions rather than from a pitch deck, and a few times a year that vantage point produces a conviction strong enough to invest behind. When it does, the company gets more than a check. It gets the bank.
Sectors we invest and advise in:
HealthcareSoftwareConsumerEnvironmentalMedia
RECORD
Track Record
Where this experience comes from
Merchant banking outcomes are positions rather than mandates, so there is no tombstone wall for this practice. There is a record instead.
Earthport (LSE:EPO)
CEO through sale to Visa. Global payments infrastructure.
Greendex
President and COO through sale to Lowe's. Draper-backed B2B ecommerce.
NextWorld
Partner. Led investment activity for a $400M evergreen growth equity fund.
Sandbridge Capital
Co-founder. Consumer fund.
Integrated VC
Managing Partner. Healthcare fund.
Wave Neuroscience
CFO, current. Healthcare SaaS.
Goldman Sachs
Start of career, New York.
12+ boards
Investor and board member, venture and growth-stage, public and private.
The above reflects David's individual investing and operating experience prior to and outside of his role at Nfluence Partners. It does not represent transactions completed by the firm.
Nfluence transaction historyTRACK RECORD
Why the bank is the edge
Most investors meet companies.
We run their processes.
An investor sees a company for an hour and decides over weeks. We see companies across months of diligence, under buyer scrutiny, with the financials opened and the customer calls made. We watch how management handles a question they were not expecting. We know which claims survived a data room and which ones did not.
That is a different quality of information, and it is not available at any price. It comes from doing the work.
It also means our conviction is expensive to fake. We are not deciding from a deck. We are deciding from a process we ran.
What the company gets that money does not buy
Capital is the least interesting thing we bring.
MARKET
The market read.
We know what comparable companies actually traded for, not what the press release said. We know which acquirers are real and which are tire-kicking. We know what a strategic will pay a premium for this year, because we asked one last month.
ECOSYSTEM
The ecosystem.
Nfluence has spent fifteen years building relationships with strategics, sponsors, and institutional investors across technology, media, and telecom. Our portfolio companies inherit that network on day one instead of building it over five years.
PLANS
The endgame, planned from the start.
Most companies meet their banker eighteen months before they need one. Ours has been in the room since the beginning. When it is time to raise the next round or run a process, the person advising you already knows the business, already knows the buyers, and has already been positioning you with them.
OPERATORS
Operators who have done it.
David has been a public company CEO and a CFO, not only an investor. That is the difference between advice that sounds right and advice that survives contact with a board meeting.
Every investor says they add value. Ours is specific and testable: we are the firm you would have hired anyway, already on your cap table, already working.
WHAT WE LOOK
What we look for
A few a year, chosen carefully
We are not deploying a fund on a clock, which means we have the rarest advantage in investing, which is the freedom to pass. We do a small number of deals a year. Every one of them has to clear all of this.
A business, not a story.
Real revenue, real customers, and unit economics that work without a narrative holding them up. Series A and B is where we are most active, though stage matters less to us than the quality of the underlying business.
Founders we want to be in the trenches with.
We are going to be in your business for years. We want to work with people who are exceptional at what they do, honest about what is hard, and ambitious about what can be built.
COMPANY WE WANT
The kind of company we want to own.
What we underwrite beyond the numbers
David and Gary share a view that is easy to dismiss until you have watched it play out across enough companies: how a business treats its people, its customers, and the world around it is a leading indicator of how it performs.
Retention compounds. Trust reduces cost. Companies that are honest about what they are building recruit people who could work anywhere. None of this appears in a model, and all of it appears in the results three years later.
We invest in companies that are financially strong and that we would be glad to be associated with regardless of the outcome. That standard removes a lot of deals from consideration, which is the point.
WIN WITH THE WINNERS
Practical Leads
Who runs this
Gary Moon
Managing Director, Co-Founder
Twenty-five years as a private equity investor and senior operator across venture, growth equity, middle-market buyout, and co-investment strategies. Partner at NextWorld, where he led investment activity for a $400 million evergreen growth equity fund. Co-founder of Sandbridge Capital. Managing Partner at Integrated VC. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in New York and has served as an investor and board member for more than a dozen venture and growth-stage companies, public and private.
David's own view is that the best investors have operating experience, and he has the record to argue it. He was CEO of Earthport, the payments infrastructure firm listed on the LSE, through its sale to Visa, and President and COO of Greendex, a Draper-backed B2B ecommerce company, through its sale to Lowe's. He currently serves as CFO of Wave Neuroscience.
He is also a co-founder of Headwaters Lab, an R&D platform exploring human consciousness and AI.
David Fife
Senior Advisor
Twenty-five years as a private equity investor and senior operator across venture, growth equity, middle-market buyout, and co-investment strategies. Partner at NextWorld, where he led investment activity for a $400 million evergreen growth equity fund. Co-founder of Sandbridge Capital. Managing Partner at Integrated VC. He began his career at Goldman Sachs in New York and has served as an investor and board member for more than a dozen venture and growth-stage companies, public and private.
David's own view is that the best investors have operating experience, and he has the record to argue it. He was CEO of Earthport, the payments infrastructure firm listed on the LSE, through its sale to Visa, and President and COO of Greendex, a Draper-backed B2B ecommerce company, through its sale to Lowe's. He currently serves as CFO of Wave Neuroscience.
He is also a co-founder of Headwaters Lab, an R&D platform exploring human consciousness and AI.
HOW WE WORK
How it works
What happens after the first conversation
We move quickly or we pass quickly.
You will not spend four months in a maybe. The information advantage that makes us good investors also makes us fast ones.
We diligence like bankers, because we are.
Expect the questions a buyer would ask in year three. Founders usually tell us this was the most useful part even when we pass.
If we invest, we are in it.
A small portfolio means real attention. You get David and Gary's mobile numbers, not a quarterly update form.
The bank stays honest.
If you later hire Nfluence for a transaction, that engagement is documented and disclosed like any other, and you are free to hire someone else. Our position in your company does not come with a claim on your future mandates.