Stefano Costa

Stefano Costa is a founding partner of Augens Capital, a Milan-based private equity investment firm founded in 2014 by professionals with backgrounds at Vestar Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, Société Générale, and Deutsche Bank. Augens positions itself as an Italian independent sponsor focused on buy-and-build operations and sector consolidation.

Before founding Augens Capital, Costa worked in investment banking as an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs International and as a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank. At Deutsche Bank, he was responsible for Italian private equity coverage.

Costa has more than 20 years of experience in private equity and finance. Augens Capital lists him as serving on the boards of San Siro, Lanificio Fratelli Cerruti, LFC Outlets, and Nuova Deroma SpA. He holds a summa cum laude degree in Economics from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where LinkedIn lists his attendance from 1993 to 1997.

• Augens Capital targets “majority management buyout and growth equity investments in the Italian middle market.”
• The firm seeks companies with established, proven business models and potential to grow through Augens’s value-creation approach.
• Target situations include family-owned companies facing succession issues, companies in fragmented sectors with consolidation potential, and businesses seeking support for international expansion.
• Augens’s value-creation model emphasizes transition from family ownership to professional management, corporate governance, strategic acquisitions, sector consolidation, and internationalization.
• The firm operates with a deal-by-deal funding strategy, pairing opportunities with institutional investors, asset managers, co-investment funds, financial institutions, and family offices depending on the company, sector, maturity, and timeframe.
• Augens says it works with management teams in a “collaborative style,” acting as “partners, not owners,” with transparency and corporate governance as recurring themes.