Mergers & Acquisitions names the 2021 Rising Stars of Private Equity, including Edgewater Capital’s Sarita Gavhane.
Prior to joining Edgewater in 2019 as a vice president, Gavhane served as a vice president of Canal Holdings LLC, where she led investment opportunities, execution and company oversight. Before that, she worked in boutique investment banking. As Edgewater partner Bob Girton explained, Gavhane had “a compelling and balanced background in accounting, banking, and sub debt investing before moving to the equity side. She is quick to earn the respect and trust both internally and externally of those she works with.”
Essential Businesses
“We have been very busy as a firm in Q2 2021,” Gavhane said. “Thanks to the legwork the firm put in 2020, all of our businesses were deemed to be essential businesses and continued to operate (with the utmost focus on safety) throughout the pandemic through today.”
As dealflow has picked up, Gavhane said that, “leaning into deals where we can deliver a true ‘value add’ to the company and sale process – either through expertise in the space or providing more certainty to close earlier in the process (e.g. experience with carveouts, doing detailed due diligence in lieu of a traditional management presentation) – has served us well.”
This past year Gavhane, “used the opportunity to reinvent her origination and networking relationships,” Girton pointed out. She “has been instrumental, leading the initial review on several add-on investments for our current portfolio, the submission of six indications of interest (more than one per month) and three Letters of Intent, which we have high expectation that at least two of those will be executed and close.”
As the sole female investment professional at Edgewater, Gavhane has “pushed us to grow and evolve as an organization,” Girton explained. “Recently, she revamped our recruiting process in a manner to encourage the identification, assessment, and recruitment of a diverse candidate to our program. Additionally, she is a founding member of Edgewater’s Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee and is driving specific work-streams.”
Gavhane has served as a committee member for the Cleveland ACG chapter’s Women in Transactions Group for several years. The group “provides networking, educational, charitable and social opportunities for female dealmakers to further their careers and create a leadership platform to promote women in the Northeast Ohio market.”
