ATHENA ADVISORS

Athena Advisors is a European private equity placement advisory established in 2026 to address a clear pain point: the lack of professional fundraising expertise in the over-performing yet underserved European small- and mid-cap market.

Our mission is to maximise our clients’ chances of fundraising success, in terms of fund size, economics, and investor base composition, while minimising the resource drain on their organisation.

Athena aspires to be recognised as a partner to exceptional fund managers, true alpha seekers, and to play a defining role in their evolution into future household names within the European private equity landscape.

In doing so, Athena aims to redefine what institutional fundraising excellence looks like in Europe’s lower mid-market.

Athena engages exclusively in primary fundraising for small and mid-cap private equity funds, therefore shying away from secondary and tertiary transactions for the most part.

Beyond formal fundraising mandates, Athena also accompanies selected managers between fundraisings through a structured investor-relations partnership: this engagement supports ongoing LP dialogue, positioning refinement, and readiness for future fund launches.

Ancillary transactions and co-investments are considered mostly as complements within a primary fundraising process and rarely pursued on a standalone basis.

Whilst we acknowledge that alternative liquidity solutions have become a structural part of the market, we make of our specialisation one of our most prized differentiators: such exclusive scope of operations, paired with a deliberately limited number of concurrent mandates, allows for uncompromising focus on what is truly the core business of the firm, substantially limiting noise and resource dispersion, and enabling a level of client service otherwise unattainable.

Athena partners with out-performing buyout, growth, and special situations funds seeking to raise their first through fourth vintage and targeting a fund size likely not higher than €500 million in commitments, as well as fundless sponsors raising single-asset vehicles.

We pride ourselves on having a particular focus on niche and non-vanilla strategies, sector- or country-specific operators, as well as independent sponsors looking to raise the first fund vehicle and non-flagship verticals or spin-off / spin-outs of established players in the market.

Most importantly, Athena makes of its reputation its main business card: as such, we will only engage with partners who display, and have displayed in their dealings, the same unfaltering commitment to the values of openness, integrity and excellence that Athena strives to embody.

This selectivity stems from the firm belief that these managers are the true alpha generators of the market and those who make private equity the highest-performing asset class in modern history.

Fundraising success is the outcome of a disciplined and rigorous process.

Athena accompanies its clients from the earliest stages of refining the positioning and narrative of the proposition, through meticulous data-room management and targeted investors engagement, to finally coordinating seamlessly with legal and compliance advisors to deliver a smooth closing.

In pursuit of operational excellence, Athena pairs an intimate knowledge of the market with substantial transaction experience and a deliberately limited number of concurrent mandates, ultimately enabling managers to raise capital efficiently while remaining focused on the operation and performance of their investment platform.