Corporate Development · Strategic Finance · Transaction Readiness

I run the transactions your team has not done before.

Public targets, cross-border, carve-outs, tax-driven structures. I work inside your team rather than from outside it — building and driving the model myself instead of waiting on answers. Twenty years a technology banker, MD/ED at Deutsche Bank, Mizuho and Nomura, $50B+ transacted. Most recently corporate development lead for an energy technology acquirer.

Start a conversation See the deal record

$50B+Aggregate transaction value led

50+M&A and capital-raise transactions

$25B+Sponsor LBO and take-private value

15Financial sponsors transacted with

10IPOs and public listings

6Countries in cross-border M&A

Proof pointNextpower
2025 — 2026

The value moves after the LOI — which is where the bank stops.

At Nextpower I led four cross-border and public-company transactions from LOI to close, as sole internal financial advisor with no bank retained on the closed deal. I was brought in to complement a capable internal team that had not acquired a public company. One closed: a carve-out from a Japanese parent, up to $365M. Two terminated on findings I surfaced and held — on a $1.5B+ sponsor-backed platform, diligence I directed cut forward EBITDA roughly 20% and the seller declined to support the number. Getting paid to say yes is how buyers overpay. I also led post-merger integration planning alongside deal delivery.

Even when an outside bank is engaged, most of their work is completed by the time the LOI is signed. However, the subsequent phases determine the financial outcome: re-underwriting the model based on due diligence, adjusting for synergies, validating the final price, and preparing board materials to support decisions. This is work that must be done internally, and it is the specific role that this firm fills.

Internal deal lead4 transactionsLOI → close — or to a documented decision to walk

How I engageFour mandates

Deal execution, not strategy decks.

Buy-side M&A execution

Target screening through close — valuation, diligence management, negotiation and definitive documentation. Embedded as the deal lead, or alongside an existing CFO.

Sell-side & exit preparation

Exit readiness, positioning and process management. Sole sell-side advisor on transactions from $33M to $2.5B, including cross-border and carve-out sales.

Strategic finance & capital formation

FP&A build-out, KPI architecture, pricing and packaging, equity compensation design, and board- and investor-grade reporting for companies preparing to scale or sell.

On the capital side: raise and exit readiness in depth — a five-year driver-based operating model, SaaS economics built to institutional standard (ARR waterfall, net revenue retention, cohort decay, LTV/CAC and payback), the data room build, and the investor narrative. Ten IPOs and public listings behind the same judgment.

Dual-track readiness

A sale and a raise share the same preparation — the operating model, segment and unit economics, market positioning and data room are common to both. What differs is the counterparty list, the narrative and the diligence emphasis, and those come late. Preparing for both keeps the option open until pricing tells you which one to take.

Engagements run from a 45-day sprint to a six-month build, depending on how much preparation already exists and the complexity of the transaction.

Included in every engagement

The analytical work is the engagement, not an add-on: full model build, synergy and scenario analysis, diligence support, and the board materials that carry the decision.

Where a process needs more hands than one, I bring in and manage that capacity under my contract, not yours. You do not need an existing finance team, an analyst bench, or a data room already built for this to work.

The alternativeWhere this fits

What you are choosing between.

VersusA full-time hire	No three-to-six-month search, no full-time compensation and equity burden. Capacity flexes up or down with deal flow.
VersusA retained bank	Embedded across the full deal lifecycle rather than origination-then-handoff — with the same caliber of relationships and modeling a retained bank would bring.
VersusA generalist consultant	Sourcing, structuring, diligence management and integration handoff. Deal-specific expertise, not general strategy advice.
VersusOther fractional operators	Two decades of enterprise software, security and tech-services deal experience, and named sponsor relationships — not a generalist background applied to M&A.

Sector focus

Enterprise softwareCybersecuritySemiconductorsFintechRenewable energyTech-enabled services

Selected transactionsAdvisory roles
across the cycle

The deal record.

Sponsor & leveraged

Buy-side advisorPermiraacquisition of TeamViewer$1.1B

Buy-side advisorFrancisco Partners / EvergreenLBO of LogMeIn$4.3B

Lead buy-side advisorRocket Software (Bain)bid for Compuware$2.0B

Cross-border

Sell-side advisor · JapanElpida Memorysale to Micron$2.5B

Advisor · TaiwanGlobalWaferspurchase of SunEdison Semiconductor$503M

Advisor · JapanRenesasLCD-driver divestiture to Synaptics$475M

Corporate & special situations

Corporate development leadNextpoweracquisition of Prevalon Energyup to $365M

Sole buy-side advisorBid for OSIsoftasset sold to AVEVA for $5BCompeting bid

AdvisorEngaged Capitalsuccessful proxy contest with RoviProxy contest

Capital markets

IPOSnowflake$3.4B

Direct listingPalantirDirect listing

IPOZoomInfo$935M

IPOMcAfee$740M

Operating engagementsThe fractional model,
already in practice

Embedded work, not advisory distance.

Nextpower — Corporate Development Lead

2025 — 2026

Led four public-company and cross-border M&A processes end to end from inside the company — as sole internal financial advisor where no bank was retained, and as internal deal lead alongside an outside adviser where one was. Owned post-merger integration alongside deal delivery.

Union Street Media — Strategic Finance Advisor

2021 — 2024

Advisor to the Founder/CEO on a targeted three-to-five-year exit: pricing and packaging redesign to lift recurring revenue, an employee equity appreciation rights plan, and evaluation of M&A options including a subsidiary sale.

Faraday — VP Finance / CFO

2021 — 2022

Board-requested churn and retention analysis, Series A readiness with funnel and long-range models, GAAP close, KPI development and quarterly board reporting.

The teamSenior professionals,
no leverage model

Who actually does the work.

LRH Quantitative is built on one staffing principle: the person running the model, the negotiation and the board materials should be the person who has done it at institutional scale — not a junior team supervised from a distance. Every engagement is led by a professional who has sat in the seat.

MCU

Matthew C. Upton

Founder
Corporate Development & Strategic Finance

Two decades as a technology investment banker, rising from Vice President to Managing Director and Head of Technology Investment Banking, with coverage of more than 100 technology clients and annual P&L responsibility up to $30M.

Since 2020, applying that execution standard from inside the company: corporate development lead at Nextpower, strategic finance advisor at Union Street Media, and fractional CFO at Faraday through a Series A process.

Head of Technology Investment Banking (MD/ED) — Deutsche Bank · Mizuho · Nomura
50+ transactions · $50B+ aggregate value · 6 countries
MBA, Berkeley Haas — Winner, Global Social Venture Competition
BA, University of Pennsylvania

The name

Everybody wants the bread.

In the fable, the little red hen asks who will help plant the wheat. Not I, says the cat. Who will help cut it, thresh it, mill it, bake it? Not I, not I, not I. Then she asks who will help eat the bread — and the volunteers arrive all at once.

Deals run the same way. Nobody raises a hand to log every risk and its mitigant, to walk the diligence tracker line by line confirming nothing was quietly left open, or to rebuild the model at midnight when a finding moves the synergy case. Everybody wants a seat at the closing dinner.

That work is not ceremony. Sloppy execution has a price, and it arrives later and in cash — an open tax exposure or a warranty liability that outruns the escrow cap, a representation nobody thought to test, an assumption that never made it into the integration plan. The unglamorous log is what keeps those off your balance sheet.

Little Red Hen Quantitative does the part nobody volunteers for. The name is a joke I intend to keep earning.

Get in touch

Tell us what's in front of you.

A live process, a target you have been circling, a raise you need to be ready for, or a corporate development function that does not exist yet. Engagements run from single-deal execution to an ongoing embedded seat.

[email protected]Princeton, New Jersey