Meet the Team
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Greg Kennedy
Founder and Managing Partner
Greg founded Advection in 2017. He previously spent his career at NASA, as a senior investment banker at UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley, as an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell, and as a Law Clerk to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He received his education at Stanford University and Stanford Law School.
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Tim Dana
Partner
Tim joined Advection in 2022. He previously spent his career as senior executive at GAM Investments, as a senior Investment banker at Citigroup and Lazard, and in the Executive Office of the President. Tim holds a BA from Princeton University.
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Mark Rosen
Partner
Mark joined Advection in 2022. He previously was a senior investment banker at Bank of America, Credit Suisse, UBS, and Barclays. He also previously was Deputy Assistant Secretary in the US Treasury and acting US Executive Director at the IMF. Mark has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Oxford University.
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Ray Ibrahim
Vice President
Ray was Advection’s first employee in 2017. He received a BBA in Statistics & Quantitative Modeling from Baruch College, as part of the Macaulay Honors College program, and attended Stuyvesant High School. He was a writer for Seeking Alpha and the COO at Baruch Investment Management Group.
From Our Founder
Thanks for your interest in Advection.
Advection's mission is to enable great venture-to-growth stage companies. We are looking for the right investment opportunities and for the right investors to support them.
For issuers, Advection places third-party capital, invests on our own behalf, and advises on strategic and operational matters. We deliver targeted groups of relevant investors likely to be useful as issuers evolve. We commit to actively supporting our portfolio companies with subsequent investment. We are the opposite of mailing-list-driven placement agents.
For investors, Advection provides compelling investment opportunities to family offices, entrepreneurs, institutions, and HNW individuals. We help validate and diligence the investments through our networks of institutional and venture community experts. We know Advection’s investors personally, we understand their areas of interest, and we don’t waste their time. And we invest alongside them.
Our merchant bank model brings issuers, investors, and Advection together. For decades on Wall Street, private partnerships put firm capital into transactions, aligning advisors, issuers, and investors together. This model fell out of favor as banks, brokers and investment firms pursued scale-driven fees and carry.
In Advection’s market, however, the merchant bank model makes sense. We sort through opportunities in a way that larger firms don’t do well. Our model requires good business selection and diligence to support our capital commitment. It is particularly good for private capital markets where price discovery is less bounded and liquidity is unclear.
Our team represents about 100 years of experience advising companies. We have been senior investment bankers on Wall Street and senior managers elsewhere. We each bring a different lens and different networks, but share careers marked by trusted advice, hard work, and the sanctity of reputation.
Many are curious about the name “Advection” — and I am glad because I thought a lot about it. Anyone who has named a business knows how difficult it is. First, I like Advection because it's easy to spell. When you say it, most people get it right the first time. Second, the English meaning — “the transfer of heat or matter by the flow of a fluid” — is a great analogy for high-quality growth capital. The Latin root meaning “to bring” or “to carry” fits particularly well with the advisory functions of the firm. Finally, the most famous manifestation of advection in the natural world — the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate — evokes my California roots. As I am fond of saying “I never miss California, because I think about it all of the time.”
We look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Greg Kennedy