Lisa Matlaf

Lisa Matlaf, Ph.D. is listed by Five Crowns Capital as a Vice President. The firm biography also describes her as a Senior Associate at Five Crowns Capital and Executive Vice President of Beautisol Holdings, LLC, a Five Crowns portfolio company in sunless tanning and sun-care products.

At Five Crowns Capital, Dr. Matlaf assists with deal origination, marketing, communications, and portfolio company oversight. In parallel, she manages operations at Beautisol Holdings, LLC.

Before joining Five Crowns Capital, Dr. Matlaf spent 10 years working in oncology, molecular biology, infectious disease, and neuroscience. Five Crowns states that her investigations led to more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications and collaborations with academic laboratories and biotechnology companies.

Dr. Matlaf received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, where she researched novel antiviral strategies for treating brain tumors in affiliation with the UCSF Brain Tumor SPORE. Five Crowns also states that she received competitive research fellowships from the American Brain Tumor Association and the NIH.

• Five Crowns Capital is not positioned as a seed-stage angel investor; it describes itself as a “multi-strategy, middle market private investment firm” focused on buyouts of mature and growing companies, businesses in transition, and complex situations.
• The firm’s preferred investment parameters are companies with $50 million to $500 million in revenue and $8 million to $75 million in EBITDA.
• Five Crowns says its investments broadly fall into corporate divestitures, unique situations, management buyouts, control buyouts, minority investments, and dividend recapitalizations.
• The firm emphasizes flexible, creative transaction structures, especially for complex, misunderstood, out-of-favor, or transition situations.
• Sector coverage is broad, with stated experience across media and entertainment, aerospace and engineering, healthcare and life sciences, building services, construction materials, energy, manufacturing/distribution, technology, consumer products, defense-related categories, and regulated consumer products.
• Dr. Matlaf’s role appears especially relevant to deal origination, marketing/communications, portfolio oversight, and Beautisol operations, rather than a publicly documented independent angel-investing practice.