From Wall street analyst to angel investor

Heather Henyon has 18 years of experience in venture finance, entrepreneurship, emerging markets, angel investing, financial technology, credit and impact investment. She is an activist investor with a passion for global fintech and women-led startups. She is a founding partner of Athena CFO, now known as Growth Partners, an outsourced CFO and finance advisory firm for startups, SMEs, growth companies and investors.

Previously, she was investment director with Eureeca, a regulated global equity crowd investing firm, where she was responsible for curation, products and investments. Henyon founded Balthazar Capital, a social enterprise investment advisory firm for the Arab region in 2010.

As the founding general manager of Grameen-Jameel, a social business jointly owned by Grameen Foundation and Abdul Latif Jameel Group, she originated, structured and closed $44 million in leveraged commercial debt financing for microfinance institutions in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.

In 2013, Heather started the Women’s Angel Investor Network (Wain), the first women’s angel investment group in the Middle East, and served as interim CFO for Little Thinking Minds, Wain’s first investment, and is currently CFO of NeedsList, a Wain investee refugee aid matching platform.

Henyon started her career on Wall Street where she worked for Standard & Poor’s as a corporate bond ratings analyst in the capital goods and auto supplier sector. Past roles include project finance, 3G wireless consultant for Middle East and Africa and Vint Cerf’s Internet architecture group at WorldCom.

Over the last 20 years, she has lived and worked in the UAE, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine, and she speaks Arabic and French. She holds an MBA from the Johnson School at Cornell University and a BA from Oberlin College. Henyon studied abroad at The American University in Cairo.