Matsu Partners was founded in 2024 by Karim Awad.

We are staffed lean, minimising our overheads which would otherwise need to be recovered from investors or our portfolio investments. This ensures we are right-sized to deliver without diluting profitability or investor returns.

We retain the benefit of advisors with distinguished careers as entrepreneurs, former executives, and with management consulting pedigree. This provides invaluable input as we seek to work with companies to instill best-practices seen elsewhere in industry. 

Karim Awad

Managing Director & Founder

Karim has over 20 years of financial services experience, including:

  • M&A advisory: Citi
  • Transaction Advisory Services: KPMG, EY
  • Private Equity (Investment): Barclays Capital Principal Investments
  • Private Equity (Operational value creation): EQT Asia

This represents a unique combination of skills, combining value creation and deal-making expertise alongside a strong grounding in accounting, tax structuring, and internal audit processes. 

Prior to starting Matsu in 2024, he led EQT Asia's data science value creation efforts across its APAC portfolio.

He has spoken at a variety of leading industry events, including SuperReturn Asia, and Amazon Web Service events, amongst others. 

He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Insead. He was a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). 

Yaw Ly

Outsourcing and AI value creation partner

Partnering with Matsu via his own agency (Yaw digital), Yaw has over 20 years of diverse experience in the IT industry, and is a marketing technology and generative AI specialist. 

Yaw has served as a solution architect, technical and delivery lead for global agencies such as Accenture Song, and IBM iX.

He has led architecture design in customer technologies, their planning and implementation for multinationals in Financial Services, Insurance, Hospitality, Utilities and Telecommunications industries.

He has worked across a range of technologies, managing data engineering teams to deliver on automation solutions across Adobe, Braze, Salesforce, AWS and Microsoft Azure.

He has an entrepreneurial spirit, characterised by proactive goal-oriented behaviour, enabling him to tackle challenges head-on and drive progressive changes within complex organisations.