Jean Manas

Jean Manas is the CEO and founder of Foros, a New York-based boutique investment bank he founded in 2009 during the financial crisis. Foros provides strategic financial and M&A advice focused on shareholder value creation, and the firm says it has advised 88 clients on 104 transactions with $78 billion in deal volume since 2009.

Before founding Foros, Manas was Americas Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Deutsche Bank and served on the bank’s Global Banking Executive Committee. Prior to Deutsche Bank, he was a Managing Director and Co-Head of Mergers & Acquisitions in Goldman Sachs’ Technology, Media and Telecommunications investment banking group, and earlier worked in J.P. Morgan’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications investment banking group.

Manas received a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he was Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a B.A., summa cum laude, from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. He also clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and had a multi-year Harvard Law School fellowship focused on prevention and mitigation of ethnonational conflicts.

Outside Foros, Manas is Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Ethiopia Education Initiatives, whose principal project is Haile-Manas Academy, a co-ed boarding school in Ethiopia.

• Publicly available sources support Manas primarily as an M&A and strategic-finance advisor, not as a conventional seed-stage angel investor with a disclosed personal portfolio.
• Foros describes its client work as “strategic financial and M&A transaction advice” across industries, with a focus on technology broadly defined.
• The firm’s stated approach emphasizes long-term value creation, rigorous analysis, intellectual integrity, independent advice, and challenging conventional wisdom.
• Foros says it works for individual companies rather than industries, does not lend to clients, does not work for activist investors, and avoids short-term transaction-driven mandates.
• Verifiable transaction types include strategic assessments, acquisitions, whole-company sales, divestitures, fairness opinions, financings, go-privates, and independent board or committee advisory roles.