Meet the investment banker helping Evercore compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan

• Insider's Banker of the Week series appears in our weekday finance newsletter, 10 Things on Wall Street.
• This week we're featuring Naveen Nataraj, senior managing director, Evercore.

Naveen Nataraj is no stranger to success on Wall Street, having been one of Insider's leading rainmakers this year.

He cobbled together at least nine big-ticket transactions in 2021 that amassed almost $60 billion in enterprise value. This included advising Athenahealth on its $17 billion sale to Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman in November, and he also worked with Nuance on a nearly $20 billion sale to Microsoft in April last year. Nataraj also quarterbacked cybersecurity firm NortonLifeLock's roughly $8.5 billion merger with digital-security firm Avast last August.

This year, he helped Vocera Communications in its $3 billion sale to Stryker in January, and in March, Nataraj advised healthcare firm Intelligent Medical Objects in its sale to investor Thomas H. Lee Partners for about $1.6 billion.

Nataraj remains universally regarded not just as a heavy rainmaker, but he's known for his ability to navigate clients — especially tech-adjacent companies — throughout times of duress, according to people familiar with the banker.

What's telling here is that Nataraj, according to peers, is a key cog in Evercore's ability to play in the same sandbox as Wall Street's most cashed-up banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

Evercore, a boutique shop lacking the balance sheet prowess of its bulge-bracket competitors, has finished 7th, 5th, and 4th in Dealogic's M&A league tables for the last three years.

And Nataraj's client relationships — nurtured over a 20-year career at the bank — and his ability to cover a "wide breadth" of sectors are a major factor in Evercore's success, said one person familiar with Nataraj.

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