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The HarbourVest Toronto Team

Sophia Maizel, CFA

Principal

Toronto

About Sophia

Sophia Maizel joined HarbourVest in 2015. She focuses on direct co-investments and fund investments including sourcing, evaluating and monitoring, and is involved in building the Firm’s presence in Canada. She is a board observer at ThoughtExchange, SamDesk and Flexpay.

Sophia joined the Firm from Export Development Canada, where she was a direct and fund-of-funds investments associate working in the private equity investments team. Her previous roles include operations at an early stage technology company.

Sophia received a BA in Economics and Finance from McGill University in 2012, and in 2017 she received the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. She has served on several committees of the Canadian Venture Capital Association and is a mentor with Canadian Women in Private Equity (CWPE). She speaks fluent Russian and French.

Continuation solutions encompass a host of transaction types in which a GP secures interim liquidity and/or additional primary capital for their LPs in a strongly performing asset, or set of assets, that the GP will continue to own and control. Specifically, they include continuation funds, new funds created by GPs for the purpose of acquiring the asset(s) that continue to be managed by the same GP and capitalized by one or several secondary buyers, or equity recapitalizations involving a direct equity or structured equity investment into a portfolio company. These transactions can also include a parallel investment from the GP’s latest fund into that same pool of assets (a “cross-fund trade”).