Jacek Byrt

Jacek Byrt is a Warsaw-based corporate-finance and M&A professional with roughly 25 years of experience advising multinationals, large Polish corporates and private-equity funds. He is best known as a co-founder and partner of Azimutus, an independent Polish M&A advisory boutique established in 2004, where he spent close to 16 years building the firm's transaction practice. Azimutus describes itself as a "pan-European investment banking boutique" offering "creative, confidential, unconflicted transaction advice," with offices in Warsaw, Geneva, Oxford (its Biotech & Healthcare unit) and Brussels. His azimutus.com email indicates a continuing association with the firm he helped found.

Before Azimutus, Byrt built an international pedigree in banking and consulting: he worked at McKinsey & Company, at Bank Zachodni WBK (now Santander Bank Polska) in Warsaw, and at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson / Commerzbank and Morgan Stanley across Frankfurt and London. Over his career he reports having completed more than 150 projects in strategic and operational consulting, M&A and corporate finance.

More recently he has held senior roles at large advisory houses. He served as Partner at EY-Parthenon, heading its Transaction Strategy & Execution practice in Poland and developing its private-equity services, and was later Partner and Head of Financial Advisory at Mazars (Forvis Mazars) in Poland. As of his most recent move he joined Alvarez & Marsal as a Managing Director to lead the firm's Deals practice in Poland, covering M&A (sell-side, buy-side and distressed), corporate finance, due diligence and post-acquisition strategy — part of A&M's expansion across the CEE region.

Academically, Byrt holds a Master of Science from the London School of Economics (2001) and a degree from the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH), including the CEMS Master's programme via HEC Paris, and completed the Advanced Management Programme at IESE Business School, Barcelona (2012). He is also an author of publications and reports on Polish economic sectors.

• Byrt's documented professional focus is M&A and strategic transaction advisory rather than a formal, disclosed venture fund; startup-investor databases (e.g., Foundersuite) classify him as an angel investor active at the seed stage, but a public personal angel portfolio is not independently verifiable.
• Sector expertise spans manufacturing, food & agriculture, healthcare, biotech/pharma, B2B/IT services and outsourcing, consumer & retail, logistics and automotive — the same sectors where Azimutus concentrates its deal flow.
• Strong orientation toward cross-border, complex European transactions, buy-side and sell-side processes, and private-equity clients.
• Through Azimutus's Oxford-based Biotech & Healthcare division, he is connected to the venture-capital ecosystem across Europe and the US — a plausible channel for any early-stage life-sciences involvement.