Michael Bijaoui

Michaël Bijaoui is a Partner and the Chief Operating Officer of East Wind Advisors, an independent investment bank founded in 2002 that advises middle-market, emerging-growth, and venture-stage companies on financings, M&A, joint ventures, restructurings, valuations, and strategic alliances. He joined the firm in 2009 from MESA, where he built out its education and business-services practice. He brings more than 20 years of corporate-development and investment-banking experience, and his advisory work concentrates on the Education & Training and Business Services sectors.

Before East Wind, Bijaoui was Vice President of Business Development at McGraw-Hill Education, which he joined around 2001 after rotations in the leadership-development program of parent company The McGraw-Hill Companies. In that role he led the publisher's global strategy and M&A activity, overseeing 13 acquisitions and equity investments across the U.S., UK, and China as well as two divestitures. He began his career in corporate finance in Europe, managing client engagements at Price Waterhouse Corporate Finance.

Bijaoui holds an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (1997–1999) and a bachelor's degree from École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP), France. He is active in education philanthropy and is featured by Teaching Matters, a nonprofit focused on closing opportunity gaps in American K-12 education.

Note on scope: Some third-party aggregators list Bijaoui as "Co-Founder & CEO of Airbyte." That appears to be a data-matching error — Airbyte was founded and is led by Michel Tricot and John Lafleur — and it is not repeated here.

• Operates primarily as a sell-side / capital-raising advisor and corporate-development strategist rather than as a check-writing angel; his value is deal structuring, M&A execution, and strategic guidance for emerging-growth companies.
• Deepest domain expertise in education technology, training, human capital, and business services — the sectors he has built practices around at both MESA and East Wind.
• Comfortable with cross-border and international transactions, having led acquisitions and equity investments in the U.S., UK, and China at McGraw-Hill Education.
• Firm-level positioning emphasizes senior-level attention on every engagement, with East Wind principals collectively citing 250+ years of transaction experience at firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.
• Publicly documented sources do not confirm a personal seed/angel portfolio, stated check size, or a written personal investment thesis; those details in the source stub could not be independently verified.