Damien Lestang

Damien Lestang is a Partner (Equity Partner) at BlackFin Capital Partners, the Paris-headquartered private equity firm founded in 2009 that specializes in asset-light financial-services companies across Europe. He joined BlackFin in 2016 — initially as a Managing Director — and works out of the firm's Paris office, part of a European platform with additional offices in Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London.

Before BlackFin, Damien spent roughly 11 years at Advent International, one of the largest global private-equity platforms, where he rose to Director and worked on numerous mid- to large-cap transactions in France and across Europe. His notable Advent deals included Oberthur Technologies (a world leader in smart-card manufacturing and mobile-payment solutions), Nocibé (the French perfume-and-cosmetics retailer later merged with Germany's Douglas to form a European leader), and Sportfive (Europe's leading sports-marketing rights agency).

Earlier in his career, Damien worked in BNP Paribas' Leveraged Finance team in Germany and at Idinvest Partners, a generalist venture-capital firm, giving him a background that spans venture, leveraged finance and large-cap buyouts. A French national, he is a graduate of HEC Paris.

At BlackFin he focuses on the firm's core buyout strategy in financial services. In October 2024 BlackFin closed its Fund IV at €1.8 billion — described as Europe's largest-ever buyout fund dedicated to asset-light financial services — bringing the firm's total assets under management to roughly €4 billion across its buyout and fintech strategies, with more than 110 transactions completed since inception.

• Invests through BlackFin's dedicated financial-services buyout funds, targeting asset-light subsegments: insurance brokerage & processing platforms, wealth management and financial advisory, asset management, payments, and financial software/processing providers — sectors the firm sees as benefiting from strong structural tailwinds.
• Prefers primary transactions, where BlackFin is the first institutional/financial sponsor and can drive operational value creation and buy-and-build consolidation, typically taking majority/control stakes.
• Pan-European mandate with a strong track record in France and the Benelux; Damien has been directly involved in Dutch financial-services deals as BlackFin expanded in the Netherlands.
• Firm-level equity checks are typically in the €10–30 million range per platform, scaling with fund size (Fund IV at €1.8bn, up ~80% from the €985m Fund III).