Chip Baird

Chip Baird is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of GreyLion Capital, a New York–based private equity firm focused on growth investments in the lower-middle market. He has spent more than 20 years as a private equity investor and has served on the boards of over 20 portfolio companies. GreyLion was originally founded in 2012 as the PWP Growth Equity strategy inside Perella Weinberg Partners, where Baird was a Partner and co-founder of the strategy; the team spun out to operate independently as GreyLion around 2020. The firm manages roughly $1.9 billion in assets and commits sizable equity checks (about $25–$125 million), which makes the stub's "angel investor / seed round" classification inaccurate — Baird is a growth-equity principal, not a seed-stage angel.

Before co-founding PWP Growth Equity in 2012, Baird was a Partner at Weston Presidio, a middle-market private equity firm. Earlier in his career he was a private equity investor at The Beacon Group, where he focused on business and industrial services, energy, and general manufacturing companies. He began his career in the Investment Banking Division at Merrill Lynch, working on mergers and acquisitions, high-yield financings, and public equity offerings.

Baird holds a B.S. in Finance and International Business from Pennsylvania State University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He resides in lower Manhattan with his wife and three children; the family prioritizes education philanthropy.

• Invests through GreyLion's growth-equity strategy in lower-middle-market companies, typically deploying $25M–$125M of equity per deal in businesses with EBITDA up to ~$50M and enterprise values up to ~$250M.
• Flexible structuring: pursues both minority and control investments, including growth capital raises, recapitalizations, and management-led buyouts.
• Concentrates on services and specialized industrial/manufacturing, with additional activity in consumer, technology/software, and healthcare services — overwhelmingly U.S.-based companies.
• Partners with existing owners and management teams as a value-add capital partner; GreyLion markets a proprietary "LIFT Framework" for operational value creation rather than purely financial engineering.
• Targets founder- and family-owned businesses at an inflection point that need capital plus operating support to scale.