About Us
Who We Are
Cornell Capital is a U.S.-based private investment firm with approximately $5.3 billion of AUM and offices in New York and Hong Kong. Leveraging decades of global investment experience, the firm takes a disciplined approach to investing across the consumer, financial services, and industrials/business services sectors, often in companies that can benefit from the firm’s Asia presence and cross-border expertise. Founded in 2013 by Senior Partner Henry Cornell, the former Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division, the firm is led by a highly seasoned team with decades of shared investment experience. We take a value-driven, partnership oriented approach to investing, targeting companies with significant potential to unlock growth through our industry, geographic and value-creation expertise.
How We Work
Highly-Seasoned, Integrated Team
Cornell Capital has been built around a team that worked together in Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division, where it was instilled with the values of collaboration, communication and process. Averaging 25 years of industry experience, the firm’s leadership is highly seasoned, with a broad network of contacts and the expertise to source, structure and execute a variety of complex investments. Our fully-staffed, 37-member team is also highly diverse, reflecting the evolving make-up our management teams and investors
Asian Expertise
Our partners have nearly 50 years of combined on-the-ground experience in Asia, giving us almost unparalleled understanding of the market. To leverage this experience, our Hong Kong and New York teams works as one cohesive unit across all stages of an investment’s life to identify appropriate investment partners, opportunities for growth and margin enhancement, and prospects for exit
Active Ownership
At Cornell Capital, our approach is unabashedly “old school”: we are industrialists rather than investors. We own our companies from initial concept to successful exit, without the need to rely on outsourced advisors or operating partners. We leverage our experience and broad network of partners to identify long-term growth drivers and support management in maximizing the full potential of a given business
High Conviction Portfolio
We believe in building a focused portfolio of investments to concentrate time and capital into our highest-conviction opportunities and achieve maximum returns. This focus enables a high degree of senior-level engagement on every aspect of investment sourcing, execution and portfolio company management
Partnership Mentality
The firm is a partnership among our team, our investors and the management teams we invest behind. Emphasizing transparency, open communication and respect in all of our interactions, we understand the fundamental importance of close relationships, collaboration and alignment. Experience has shown that by creating strong management incentives, aligned with our investors, we will attract the outstanding leaders critical to driving results. We also understand the importance of generating attractive investment returns and co-investment opportunities for our investor base to create the kind of deeply rooted relationships that in turn provide support across the breadth of our investment activities
What We Look For
We look to partner with companies that have:
- Significant potential to unlock growth through our industry, geographic and value-creation expertise
- Market leading positions and established customer relationships, strong brands, sustainable competitive advantages and favorable industry dynamics
- Established business models that can be extended to drive additional revenue and profit growth
- Strong management teams that embrace ownership-based incentive structures
- Opportunity to leverage our unique experience and capability in expanding US-based businesses to Asia
- Responsible businesses that we are proud to own and that adhere to environmental, social and governmental policies