Thomas Pinks

Thomas Pinks is a private-equity investor with roughly 15 years of experience across principal investing and investment banking, specialising in industrials and complex corporate carve-outs. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Business, Mathematics and Statistics and a Master's degree (MSc) in Finance, both from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Earlier reporting also notes an early role as a credit analyst at Mizuho Investment Management before his LSE studies.

Pinks began his transaction career in advisory, working at Pöyry Capital and Alegro Capital on the structuring and execution of cross-border M&A in the industrials and packaging sectors, before joining HSBC's EMEA M&A team as a senior M&A associate. In March 2017 he was one of four hires announced to AURELIUS's London investment team, where he sourced and executed UK and pan-European deals.

At AURELIUS (AURELIUS Equity Opportunities), Pinks became a Principal / Investment Director, executing transactions spanning industrials, packaging, chemicals, retail and healthcare, and leading corporate carve-outs, special situations and growth initiatives, with a particular focus on European and North American industrial carve-outs.

In September 2025 — coinciding with OpenGate Capital's 20th anniversary — Pinks joined OpenGate as Principal and Head of Business Development. In this role he leads origination of carve-out transactions across the Industrials sector and helps drive OpenGate's transatlantic (Europe/North America) deal sourcing. OpenGate's team page lists his office as Paris, France.

• Invests as a control private-equity buyer, not an angel/seed backer — the "Angel Investors / Seed Round" label in the source stub does not match the verified record.
• Core strategy is corporate carve-outs: separating and standing up non-core divisions of large corporates, where speed, certainty of close, and operational transformation create the value.
• Sector concentration in industrials: Paper & Packaging, Chemicals, Aerospace & Defence, Building Products, Capital Goods, Metals & Mining, and Industrial Services.
• Deal profile (firm-level, OpenGate): targets with revenues up to ~$1bn and enterprise values up to ~$500m in Europe and North America; also pursues special situations and consolidation plays in fragmented markets.
• Values situations that are operationally complex or hard to separate — OpenGate emphasises operational expertise, transition planning and subject-matter-expert networks over financial engineering.