Stefan Zuckut

Dr. Stefan Zuckut is founder and a Principal Consultant at Kestrel Partners and has more than 20 years of experience in M&A, finance, corporate development, and management consulting. During his career, Stefan has been involved in the project management of more than 80 projects relating to M&A, divestitures, and liquidations of companies.

In his current role as management consultant, he leads various projects at Fortune 500 companies relating to M&A integration strategy and execution.

His past assignments included finance and executive positions at technology companies and a board of director position at Natural Health Trends, a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. While on the board of Natural Health Trends, he was instrumental in managing the successful turnaround of the company and chaired the audit and compensation committees.

In 2006, Stefan built up from scratch the accounting, commercial, and legal infrastructure for Blade Network Technologies (BLADE), a spin out from Nortel Networks. As executive at BLADE, Stefan led corporate development, finance and legal functions worldwide. BLADE was sold to IBM in 2010 and became the most successful private equity investment by Garnett & Helfrich, a boutique private equity firm in San Mateo, CA.

Stefan’s prior experience includes finance, treasury, corporate development and strategic planning positions at companies of various sizes, from start-ups to ARCO, Mattel Toys, Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies, and work as an analyst in the investment field with Bowman Capital and Top Sight Capital, technology-focused hedge funds. At Agilent’s Corporate Development group, Stefan led multi-functional project teams to evaluate and consummate more than three dozen M&A transactions and venture capital investments. He was instrumental in spearheading the successful strategic re-orientation and restructuring of Agilent’s storage technology group. Prior to his work at Hewlett-Packard / Agilent, Stefan founded and ran AP Technologies, a technology commercialization and management consulting boutique.

His professional career started at premier management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Germany and Switzerland. Stefan also has had an active interest in his family’s business, W.Suckut VDI, a manufacturer of process technology components and equipment in Germany.

Stefan holds an MBA from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Darmstadt Institute of Technology, Germany, and a Ph.D. in financial economics from the University of Cologne, Germany. His Ph.D. dissertation under thesis supervisor Professor Dr. Herbert Hax focused on valuation techniques for international mergers and acquisitions.