Stefan Zuckut, PhD

Dr. Stefan Zuckut is the founder and a Principal Consultant at Kestrel Partners. He has more than 20 years of experience in M&A, finance, corporate development, and management consulting, and 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, Stefan leads M&A integration strategy and execution engagements at Fortune 500 companies. His past assignments have included finance and executive positions at technology companies and a board of directors position at Natural Health Trends (NASDAQ), where he was instrumental in managing a successful company turnaround and chaired the audit and compensation committees.

In 2006, Stefan built the accounting, commercial, and legal infrastructure from scratch for Blade Network Technologies, a spin-out from Nortel Networks. As an executive at Blade, he 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 Capital in San Mateo, CA.

Earlier in his career, Stefan held finance, treasury, corporate development, and strategic planning positions at ARCO, Mattel Toys, Hewlett-Packard, and Agilent Technologies. At Agilent's Corporate Development group, he led multi-functional project teams to evaluate and consummate more than 36 M&A transactions and venture capital investments, and spearheaded the strategic re-orientation and restructuring of Agilent's storage technology group. He also worked as an investment analyst at Bowman Capital and Top Sight Capital (technology-focused hedge funds), founded and ran AP Technologies (a technology commercialization and management consulting boutique), and began his career at McKinsey & Company in Germany and Switzerland.

Stefan also maintains an active interest in his family's business, W.Suckut VDI, a manufacturer of process technology components and equipment in Germany.