Joseph Mooney

Joseph Mooney is a senior mergers-and-acquisitions banker with roughly three decades of Wall Street experience. He began his M&A career in the M&A groups of Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley, then spent about 15 years at Citigroup (from 1999), rising to Managing Director and ultimately serving as the senior M&A partner overseeing East Coast technology. He advised domestic and international clients across buy-side, sell-side, merger-of-equals, and activist-defense engagements.

In April 2013 he left Citigroup to join Sagent Advisors, an independent M&A-focused investment bank (founded 2004), as Managing Director and Head of Mergers & Acquisitions. When announcing the hire, Sagent CEO Hal Ritch described Mooney as "first and foremost [an] outstanding advisor to clients." Sagent was subsequently combined into DC Advisory (a Daiwa Securities affiliate), and the standalone Sagent brand wound down.

In September 2016, Mooney moved to Houlihan Lokey, joining its Mergers & Acquisitions Group as a Managing Director in New York. He cited being "attracted to Houlihan Lokey by its strong reputation for delivering independent, high quality advice and superior results." At Houlihan Lokey his stated coverage spans technology, financial technology, healthcare, and business services.

He holds a B.A. in History from Hampden-Sydney College and an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

• Mooney's professional activity is corporate M&A advisory, not startup equity investing — there is no publicly stated "thesis," check size, or target-company profile for angel/seed deals.
• Where he adds value is at the later, transactional end of a company's life: sales, divestitures, mergers-of-equals, buy-side acquisitions, and activist-defense situations — typically for established companies, not seed-stage startups.
• Sector emphasis: technology and fintech first, with meaningful healthcare and business-services experience.
• Deal profile: large-cap and mid-to-large corporate transactions (hundreds of millions to billions of dollars), frequently cross-border.