Rene Matthews Usher

René Matthews-Usher is a co-founder and Managing Director of Dragonfly Capital, a Charlotte, North Carolina investment-banking and advisory firm she launched in 2000 alongside Don Millen, Jr. Over her 25-plus-year career she has focused on private equity, corporate finance, and M&A for owner-operated small and middle-market companies, and she holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. She is registered with FINRA (CRD #2433659) as a broker and registered principal of the firm.

Before founding Dragonfly, she was Director of Private Equity at Marion Bass Securities in Charlotte, where she established and ran the firm's Private Equity Group beginning in 1994. Earlier in her career she worked in the Research Department of The Robinson-Humphrey Company in Atlanta and with Dr. Donald Ratajczak at Georgia State University's Economic Forecasting Center. She has also been associated with AMP (referenced in third-party listings as a CFO role), consistent with the firm's active work in the solar/renewable-energy space.

She earned a BS in Accounting from Mercer University and a Master of Finance from Georgia State University. A native of New South Wales, Australia, she is a mother of two whose personal interests include yoga, running, golf, scuba diving, and snowboarding, and she supports charitable organizations serving underprivileged children.

At Dragonfly, she is part of a senior leadership team that maintains relationships with 300+ institutional investors—major private-equity and debt funds, foreign investors, commercial banks, insurers, and pension funds—which the firm taps to structure and raise private debt and equity for its clients.

• Advises and invests in family- and founder-owned lower-middle-market businesses, typically with revenue of ~$5M–$100M and EBITDA of ~$1M–$10M.
• Works across three core mandates: liquidity events (sale/recapitalization for owners), growth capital (debt and/or equity raised to fund geographic expansion, product-line extension, acquisitions, or JVs), and partial-liquidity/refinancing (dividend recaps, leveraged recaps, debt refinancing).
• Sector emphasis on energy/renewables, healthcare services (vision & dermatology), industrials & manufacturing, business services, IT services, and consumer/retail.
• The firm positions itself as an "independent advisory boutique dedicated to offering unbiased advice"—suggesting alignment, a structured process, and clean advisory economics matter to them.
• Listed by investor databases (aVenture, OpenBeta, VC Datalab) as an angel/seed contact, but her primary lane is M&A advisory and private-capital raising, not pure venture seed checks—founders should calibrate accordingly.