Simone Cavalieri

Simone Cavalieri is an Italian private-equity executive who spent roughly a 25-year career in international finance and buyouts. He graduated from Bocconi University in Milan with a degree in Business Administration. His career began in 1999 at Merrill Lynch International (later Bank of America), where he worked for close to nine years in Investment Banking, first in London and then in Milan.

In 2009 he moved into private equity, joining the pan-European fund Charme Capital Partners, where for nearly a decade he was a Partner and a member of the Investment Committee (including Charme III), focused on the fund's Italian market. In early 2019 he joined PAI Partners — the Paris-headquartered global buyout firm — opening/leading its Milan office and heading PAI's Italian activities.

On 1 July 2024, Cavalieri stepped down as Partner and Head of Italy at PAI after almost six years, agreeing exit terms with the firm's management. He stayed on as a senior advisor to PAI through the end of 2024 to ensure an orderly transition of the Italian portfolio. Italian press (Il Sole 24 Ore) reported at the time that, given his profile and network, he was considering launching a new project of his own; as of mid-2026 no concrete new fund or venture has been publicly confirmed. He is no longer listed on PAI's current Italy team page.

• Control buyouts, not venture/seed: Cavalieri's track record is in acquiring majority/control stakes in established, cash-generative Italian companies — a fundamentally different profile from an angel or seed-stage investor.
• Italian mid-to-large-cap champions: Focus on Italian market-leading businesses that can be scaled internationally, consistent with both Charme's and PAI's playbooks.
• Sector patterns: Advanced/industrial manufacturing (automotive materials, electric-motor components), tech-enabled and insurance services (telematics), and consumer/financial-software businesses.
• Value creation through internationalization and operational scaling rather than early-stage bets — deals were typically sourced within a pan-European institutional fund structure with large equity checks.