The firm
Cognizant Capital is two people. We met on a technology coverage team, spent several years building models for transactions we did not choose, and left within a year of each other. Twice since, founders we knew asked us to help them raise. Both times it went well enough that we decided to find out whether it generalises.
Investment banking is very good at one thing: taking an asset that is difficult to value, constructing the argument for what it is worth, and running a competitive process that forces the market to respond by a date. That machinery is applied almost exclusively to companies large enough to pay for it.
Meanwhile the companies that need it most — frontier businesses whose value is entirely in the terminal, being sold to investors who mostly cannot price them — are told to figure it out on their own between board meetings, using a template deck and a warm-intro spreadsheet.
We think that gap is real, and we think it is worth a fee. That is the whole thesis of the firm. Whether founders agree is what the next two years will tell us.
We are not a fund and we do not invest. We have no portfolio to protect and no allocation to defend, which means our advice about who should be on your cap table is not contaminated by wanting to be on it ourselves.
We are also not a large firm pretending to be a small one. There are two of us. The people who write your memo are the people in the room when it is challenged, which is the entire trade we are offering. If you need a global syndication desk, you need a bank.
01 Partners
Placeholder name & biography
Seven years in technology investment banking across London and New York, latterly on the software and semiconductors coverage team. Ran sell-side processes and private placements; spent an unreasonable share of that time rebuilding other people's models. Leads the investment case and the operating model.
Placeholder name & biography
Six years in investment banking, industrials and aerospace & defense coverage, with a stint in a growth fund's deal team. Knows the procurement side of the space sector better than any sane person should. Leads investor targeting and process management.
Beyond the two of us we work with a standing bench of specialists — a designer, a technical diligence reader in each sector, and counsel — brought in per mandate rather than carried as overhead.
02 Track record
A Series A for an in-space servicing company and a growth round for an inference infrastructure business — both closed, both structured differently because the companies were different. The full accounts, including what a tombstone cannot tell you, are in the case studies.
03 Principles
I
A mandate we should have declined costs the founder six months and costs us the only thing we have, which is the willingness of good investors to open our emails.
II
Design, meetings and momentum all follow from an argument that holds. If the argument does not hold, no amount of process fixes it.
III
We will be back next year with another company. An investor who has never been wasted by us takes the second call. That is the entire asset.
IV
Usually in week one, usually about valuation. It is the part of the job we are paid for and the part everyone else avoids.
04 Enquiries
If the fit is obvious you will know within a call, and so will we.