Banker fluency. Builder context.
Two partners. Seventeen years of senior M&A on one side. Built and shipped AI products on the other. Every mandate is run by someone who has sat in the founder's seat.
Daniel Bae
Daniel spent 17 years at the senior end of M&A. Most recently a Director on Citi's TMT team in London, before that VP at Moelis & Company, and Associate to Associate-Director at ANZ Investment Banking. Across those seats he advised on or led over $30 billion of transactions — working with founders, sponsors, and corporate development teams across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
In 2025 he stepped off the desk to co-found amafi.ai. The pivot wasn't theoretical: he and Valentin built and shipped production AI products end-to-end, from model selection and eval harness design through to pricing, hiring, and the messy work of figuring out what a product actually is. Daniel has been on the founder side of fundraising, board construction, and a sales motion that doesn't yet exist.
At Amafi he leads the Strategic, Fundraising, and M&A mandates. Every engagement is partner-run from the first call — no analyst layer, no pitch-deck pyramid. The conversation across the table is with someone who has sat in both seats.
Valentin Badonfai
Valentin is an engineer first, with prior time on the institutional side at Deutsche Bank. He has built and shipped production AI systems end-to-end: model selection, retrieval and routing, evaluation harnesses that actually catch regressions, and the cost-and-latency models that survive contact with real traffic. So when he sits across from a target's CTO, the conversation is with a peer — and one who has also been on the receiving end of bank-grade diligence.
In 2025 he co-founded amafi.ai with Daniel. He owns the architecture, the model stack, and the eval discipline. The work is not theoretical — it's been pushed to production, observed under load, and rebuilt where the numbers said to.
At Amafi he leads Technical Advisory: architecture review, model and vendor selection, eval-framework audits, and engineering-side due diligence for acquirers and growth-equity investors. His DD reports sit next to the financial DD binder — same rigour, same language. The difference: Valentin reads the actual repo, and tells you which seams a buyer's CTO will pick at before they get there.
"Most advisors understand deal mechanics but not the product. Most operators understand the product but not the transaction. We've shipped both."— The reason Amafi exists
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