Two Wall Street veterans, former Bear Stearns investment bankers Denis Bovin and Michael Urfirer, officially launched Stone Key Partners today. The boutique investment banking firm, which has been operating under the radar for nearly a year, will focus on strategic advisory services, including M&A advice.
Stone Key, which has about a dozen people in all right now, plans to focus on technology, aerospace, defense, homeland security and information services. The firm made it to Thomson Reuters’ annual rankings for 2008 for advising on about $5.5 billion in M&A transactions. Bovin and Urfirer, who have worked together since 1994, have been involved in big deals such as Finmeccanica’s $5.2 billion acquisition of DRS Technologies, among others.
Bovin, 61, and Urfirer, 49, are co-chairmen and co-CEOs of Stone Key. Dealzone caught up with the two of them for a Q&A:
DZ: You’ve been operating under the radar for almost a year now. Why the announcement now?
Bovin: We decided both for choice and chance that we would wait to make an announcement. The choice was that we really wanted to have a significant funding source behind us and we wanted to have some deals done. The chance was, it took a lot longer to actually set this up. If you want to set up a boutique that’s going to last for a week-and-a-half, it’s real easy. If you want to set one up that you think you can build into something major, it takes a lot longer. So that chance took us longer than we expected but we did close on our financing and we’ve announced five-and-a-half to six dollars worth of deals, so we thought this was the right timing.
