Moelis & Company Brand Guidelines: A 2007 Independent Adviser and a 2014 NYSE Listing

New York and Los Angeles, and a team from UBS.

Moelis & Company was founded in July 2007 by Ken Moelis with partners including Navid Mahmoodzadegan and Jeffrey Raich, English Wikipedia says, and opened in New York and Los Angeles; its headquarters are in New York. Forbes reported in April 2014 that Ken Moelis left a top job at UBS to start the firm in 2007, and Variety reported in June 2025 that Mahmoodzadegan had worked alongside him at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette from 1995 to 2001 and then followed him to UBS Investment Bank, where he was global head of media investment banking until 2007.

The firm gives advice rather than selling products. English Wikipedia describes it as an adviser to corporations, governments and financial sponsors on mergers and acquisitions, recapitalisations, restructurings and other corporate-finance decisions, and the company’s website speaks of “a team who delivers independent advice.” In its first full year, English Wikipedia says, it advised Anheuser-Busch on its sale to InBev, a mandate Forbes also listed in 2014, and Yahoo in its defence against an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft. In 2008 it opened a restructuring practice with senior bankers in New York, Los Angeles and London, and within two years of opening it was working from six cities.

Offices, alliances and a listing.

Growth came office by office. English Wikipedia lists Sydney in August 2009; Dubai in January 2011, while the firm advised the Government of Dubai on the restructuring of its holding company Dubai World; Hong Kong; and São Paulo in March 2014. In January 2012 Moelis & Company announced a strategic alliance with the Japanese banking group SMFG and its securities arm, SMBC Nikko. The Australian business listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2017 and now operates as MA Financial Group. The Moelis website describes a strategic alliance with MA Moelis Australia, the corporate advisory and equities division of MA Financial Group, and another in Mexico with Alfaro, Dávila y Scherer, an advisory firm founded in 2003.

The company went public in April 2014. Forbes reported that its shares began trading on 16 April 2014 and rose above the offer price in their first morning; the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Two months later, English Wikipedia says, it set up a private funds advisory business, now called Private Capital Advisory, and in February 2015 it opened an office in Washington, DC. In 2017 it was appointed a lead adviser on the planned initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, and in April 2023 it hired a technology banking team from Silicon Valley Bank, which doubled the number of bankers on its technology team.

Its record is a list of mandates rather than products. English Wikipedia names early restructuring work including the reorganisation of AMR Corporation and its merger with US Airways Group, the recapitalisation of the Co-operative Bank in Britain and the restructuring of the Icelandic bank Glitnir, alongside the sale of Hilton Hotels to Blackstone. Forbes noted in 2014 that the firm had worked with the board of Heinz when Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital bought the company. Later work listed by English Wikipedia includes the acquisition of Chelsea F.C., the merger of Three UK with Vodafone UK, and the sale of a minority stake in the New York Giants. Media has been a strong thread: Variety reported in 2025 that Mahmoodzadegan had advised on more than 200 media transactions, among them the sale of Dorna Sports to Liberty Media, United Talent Agency’s purchase of the football agency ROOF, and New Mountain Capital’s acquisition of Broadcast Music, Inc.

Design and documentation.

Independent investment banks sell advice rather than balance sheets, and their public identities tend to reflect that. An advisory firm’s website usually leads with a name, a list of offices and a record of work. Most of the firms in this guide carry the surname of a founder or founding family, and the house name is typically set in a restrained serif or a plain sans with almost no ornament. The office list itself can run to dozens of cities on several continents.

The record of work is the centrepiece. Advisory firms publish transaction lists, the modern form of the printed “tombstone” notice, naming the client, the counterparty, the firm’s role and the year. Evercore’s transactions pages, for example, mark each mandate as pending or closed. In these guides the deals are named without their sums.

Around that record sit a handful of recurring page types: sector and coverage pages describing the industries and kinds of assignment a firm handles, such as mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, capital markets and private capital; team and leadership pages with partner biographies; and, at firms with research or asset management arms, research reports, outlooks and insights. Media pages often consist largely of announcements of senior hires by sector and city.

Careers pages complete the set: they describe training programmes, internships and the idea of partnership; Evercore, for one, calls talent its primary distinguishing asset. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, how its ownership changed and how it presents itself today — and keeps each firm’s own claims attributed to it.

A founder’s name, a short promise and a record of mandates.

Leadership passed within the founding group in 2025. Variety reported on 9 June 2025 that Navid Mahmoodzadegan, a co-founder and co-president, would succeed Ken Moelis as chief executive on 1 October 2025. Moelis, who had led the firm since its launch in 2007, would become executive chairman and keep advising clients, and Jeff Raich, the other co-founder and co-president, would become executive vice chairman. Mahmoodzadegan also joined the board, Variety reported, and the magazine noted that he had practised law at Irell & Manella, after Harvard Law School, before his banking career began. In the firm’s press release, quoted by Variety, he spoke of putting “clients first” as the key to its long-term success.

The website carries the line “Trusted Relationships, Exceptional Outcomes” and, the company says, a team of about 1,500 employees and 180 managing directors in 24 locations. It groups its work into four areas: M&A and Strategic Advisory, Capital Markets, Capital Structure Advisory and Private Capital Advisory, with an industry expertise section alongside. Transactions appear as tiles tagged by service, sector and year, and some are marked as pending or withdrawn. A senior team page, careers pages for students, graduates and experienced hires, and a news section of hiring announcements make up the rest of the site.

For a design guide, Moelis & Company shows how a firm founded in 2007 presents itself through a founder’s surname, a short promise and a record of mandates. Compare Evercore, another independent adviser based in New York, and PJT Partners. For this guide we use a charcoal, a slate blue and a pale stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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