Meet 7 up-and-coming investment bankers riding the dealmaking rebound

• Wall Street’s dealmaking has gained momentum over the last two quarters.
• Nominees for Wall Street Rising Stars are US-based, 35 or younger, and exceptional.
• We highlight bankers advising on major mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, and investment opportunities.

The Wall Street dealmaking engine is starting to roar again, and bankers are finding their stride.

We’ve rounded up some of the rising rainmakers from across investment banks, as featured on our latest Rising Stars of Wall Street list. To be considered, nominees must be US-based, 35 or younger, and stand out among their peers. Business Insider’s editors make the final selections.

Here, we highlight a handful of top investment bankers advising on some of the biggest M&A deals, IPOs, and carve-outs — or creating new opportunities for investors.

Mary-Grace Papatheodorou, 35, Morgan Stanley

Mary-Grace Papatheodorou worked on her first IPO in 2012, as an analyst on Jefferies’ equity capital markets desk. She remembers watching in awe as the woman running Manchester United‘s equity syndicate negotiated prices and stake sizes with hungry investors.

“I remember thinking to myself at the time, wow, that’s the coolest job I’ve ever seen,” Papatheodorou told Business Insider.

Today, she’s a managing director on Morgan Stanley’s global capital markets’ equity syndicate desk.

“I have to ask investors to step on price or to accept smaller or larger allocations to move the demand. You have to ask — the worst that can happen is someone says no, and at least then you know your answer,” she said. “It’s tough to put yourself out there, but it’s a lot worse not to.”

Papatheodorou spent nearly 10 years at Jefferies before joining Morgan Stanley in 2021. She managed the equity syndicates of some of this year’s highest-profile IPOs, including Figma, Chime, and CoreWeave.

Aman Mittal, 35, Moelis & Company

The data center industry has become a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity that has transfixed Wall Street.

Aman Mittal, a managing director at Moelis & Company, is helping the storied advisory firm establish itself as a leading player in the mergers and acquisitions, investments, and debt deals that are fast shaping the sector.

Mittal advised the data center company Core Scientific on its announced $9 billion sale to CoreWeave and worked with Apollo on its deal to buy a majority stake in the data center developer and operator Stream Data Centers. He also helped another large data center platform, Prime Data Centers, arrange the sale of an undisclosed ownership stake in it to institutional investors Snowhawk and Nuveen.

And that was just over the summer. In the past three years, Mittal has worked on more than 15 data center-related transactions with a total deal value exceeding $25 billion.

Mittal got his start studying electronics and communications engineering in his home country of India before getting an MBA at the NYU Stern School of Business. He began as an analyst at Bain & Company in technology, media, and telecom, before moving to Evercore to advise in those sectors.

In 2022, he joined Moelis to help lead its growing practice in the booming digital infrastructure space, particularly data center deals.

Jack Levendoski, 35, JPMorgan

Jack Levendoski is riding the rebound in M&A after a rocky start to the year. An executive director in JPMorgan’s M&A group, he has worked on some of 2025’s largest technology transactions, including Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk and Xero’s $2.5 billion purchase of Melio. After a choppy first half marked by rate uncertainty and geopolitical risk, he says the market now “feels extremely busy.”

He’s used to big-ticket transactions: In 2022, Levendoski was part of Twitter’s $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, a transaction that unfolded under global scrutiny. “The pace at which that all happened, the level of public scrutiny‚ it was pretty amazing,” he told Business Insider. He also worked on Squarespace’s $6.9 billion take-private with Permira in 2024, Savvy Gaming Group’s $4.9 billion acquisition of Scopely in 2023, and the merger of World Wrestling Entertainment and UFC, valued at about $21 billion.Levendoski has advised on more than $300 billion in deal value.

Artificial intelligence has been a recurring theme in recent deals, in how companies are valued and in how bankers operate. Being an early adopter has given Levendoski “quick answers to hard questions that perhaps before required significant research,” he said.

After starting his career at Chevron, where he worked as a facilities engineering project manager, Levendoski joined JPMorgan in 2016, supporting capital projects and offshore oil and gas projects in the Gulf of Mexico.

Joe Slevin, 35, Jefferies

When Joe Slevin started specializing in the resale market of private equity stakes in 2015, it was a niche that “barely existed,” he told Business Insider.

Now, secondary deals are on the rise — with a record $103 billion worth of activity completed globally in the first six months of 2025, according to Jefferies.

UK-native Slevin started his career as a JPMorgan investment banker in London, then sought “an area of finance where there was huge growth potential,” that was “off the beaten path.”

He joined Coller Capital, a pioneer in what was then the nascent secondaries industry. After three years on the buy side, Slevin returned to banking to advise investors on secondary transactions at PJT Partners and Guggenheim Partners.

In 2021, he joined Jefferies to cofound their Private Capital Advisory team, which advises investors on selling some of their private portfolios to other investors and fund operators on spinning out select assets into new funds.

In the first half of this year, the PCA team advised on over $31 billion in secondary transactions. Slevin focuses on deals led by private equity or credit operators, recently working with ONCAP, Gryphon Partners, and Trinity Ventures. The most well-known version of this is a continuation fund, which is set up to buy one or more assets they already own — giving liquidity to investors who need it while continuing to wring returns out of assets.

Jackie Shepherd, 34, Morgan Stanley

Jackie Shepherd is a vice president in Morgan Stanley’s Separations and Structured Solutions group, which specializes in helping companies transform subsidiaries into standalone entities.

She has advised on about $250 billion worth of corporate spin-offs, including Comcast’s pending carve-out of its cable networks into Versant Media Group. She says it’s a “unique way” for Comcast to become more focused on where the future of media is going. The goal with the deals she works on is to “disentangle” businesses that don’t make sense together but are strong and “have agendas that they want to do on their own.”

Shepherd started her career in accounting on EY’s international tax team, where she first saw the work of investment bankers up close. “I didn’t realize that there was an intersection between the two,” she said. “I wanted to be the person coming up with more of the cool ideas.”

She restarted her career in M&A and was recruited as an analyst by Goldman, where she found her mentor, Michael Kagan; she later followed him to Citi and Morgan Stanley, which she joined in 2023.

Josef Menasche, 34, Goldman Sachs

About four years ago, Josef Menasche was working at a boutique secondaries firm on a deal alongside Goldman Sachs bankers. He came away convinced that his industry, which deals in sales of private fund stakes, was headed for change.

So he called Goldman and said, “Hey, you should just hire me because we already had a great working dynamic on this deal. Wouldn’t it be better if we were actually working together?”

He joined the bank’s secondaries business at the end of 2021 and today is a managing director and global cohead of secondaries advisory. He said 2025 has been a turning point, following several years of caution among investors regarding capital commitments. “The level of creativity that we’ve seen in 2025 has been really, really exciting to work with,” he said — a sign that the market is picking up.

His team has executed transactions across infrastructure, real estate, private equity, and venture capital. The highlights include a $3.1 billion single-asset continuation vehicle — allowing a private equity firm to extend its investment in a company — with New Mountain Capital for Real Chemistry.

“Half of it was providing the distribution to original investors, half was actually primary capital for future M&A, which is pretty unusual,” he said. “The fact that they’re willing to put so much fresh money into the new M&A through another business is pretty unusual. It’s a general sign of people feeling good about the world.”

Menasche studied chemistry at Cambridge. He found the lab environment too slow and shifted into finance. Early experience at secondaries-focused boutique Campbell Lutyens gave him a foothold in the industry.

Florian Plath, 34, JPMorgan

In 2022, Florian Plath got a call from one of his bosses at JPMorgan Chase with an assignment: Join the deal team on Broadcom‘s $90 billion acquisition of VMware, one of the largest tech acquisitions in history.

It was a pivotal and fast-moving experience for the banker, who’s since advised on other multibillion-dollar transactions, including Altair’s $10.6 billion sale to Siemens and Altium’s $6 billion sale to Renesas. Earlier in his career, he worked on Maxim Integrated’s $29 billion all-stock merger with Analog Devices — one of the largest semiconductor transactions on record.

Plath started at JPMorgan as an intern in the London office. Today, he is an executive director and top advisor in its mergers and acquisitions group, working with leading technology clients.

Reflecting on these deals, Plath said the constant across them is how quickly teams must mobilize and solve problems in dynamic markets — especially those as ever-changing as the tech sector. He has observed that strategic corporate buyers, after a quieter stretch, have recently begun revving the engine of dealmaking activity again — especially around AI and software — while private equity sponsors continue to search for bargain buys.

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