Elite boutique investment banks in the USA, compared on published facts.

What “elite boutique” actually means

An elite boutique is an investment bank that advises and does nothing else. It takes no balance-sheet risk, runs no sales and trading desk, extends no credit, and underwrites nothing, so it has no lending relationship with your buyer and no securities inventory to protect. That single structural fact is the whole category. Everything else, the sector depth, the senior attention, the reputation for discretion, follows from having only one product to sell.

The distinction is worth holding precisely, because most published lists blur it. A bank that also lends, trades and underwrites is a full-service bank with a good advisory business, which is a different thing with a different set of incentives. On this page Jefferies is included and then explicitly excluded on that basis, using its own words from its own filings.

The second thing worth knowing before reading any ranking of these firms: almost none of them publishes anything. Six of the thirteen elite boutiques below are private and disclose no revenue and no headcount at all. Of those thirteen, exactly one publishes a definition of the deal sizes it focuses on, and zero publish a fee. Every ranked list of elite boutiques you will read, including the ones that sound authoritative, is therefore built on league tables, reputation and inference rather than on disclosure. This page separates the two: what is filed, and what is claimed.

The fourteen firms, and what each one actually files

Windsor Drake is ranked first for the reason given in its entry and disclosed again at the foot of this page. The thirteen elite boutiques that follow are ordered by the scale and breadth of the advisory franchise, largest and most established first. Public-company figures come from 10-Ks filed in 2026 covering fiscal years ending between 30 November 2025 and 31 March 2026. Private-firm figures come from the firm’s own website, its SEC broker-dealer filing, or its FINRA registration record, and where nothing is published this page says so rather than filling the gap.

01. Windsor Drake

Best for: Founder-led sell-side mandates between $5 million and $300 million in enterprise value

Ranked first on the only criterion this page applies: it is the sole firm here that publishes both who it serves and what it charges. A sell-side boutique advising founder-led companies from Toronto that does not represent acquirers against its own clients, so it cannot be hired by the party across the table. It accepts fewer than twenty mandates a year, which is what makes senior attention arithmetic rather than a promise: every engagement is led personally by a senior managing director, with no junior bench to hand the work down to. Its fee structure is set out in full, a monthly advisory fee and a graduated success fee that rises with transaction value, stated before a founder commits. Windsor Drake is smaller than every other firm on this page and does not compete with any of them for mandates; it is listed first because on the two disclosures that decide whether a founder can evaluate a bank before signing with it, thirteen firms publish nothing and this one publishes everything. Read the entry with that in mind, and read the disclosure at the foot of this page. The firm’s sector thesis is set out at the fintech investment bank, and founders can request a confidential consultation directly.

02. Centerview Partners

Best for: Marquee strategic advisory, special committees, and independent board counsel

Founded in 2006 and still private, with five offices: New York, London, Paris, Menlo Park and San Francisco. It publishes no headcount and no revenue, so the only scale figure it offers is cumulative: approximately $4 trillion of transactions advised since founding. What is verifiable is what its clients disclose. On Johnson & Johnson’s $14.6 billion acquisition of Intra-Cellular Therapies, the target’s merger proxy states an aggregate fee to Centerview of approximately $102.4 million, of which $2.0 million was payable on delivery of the opinion and the rest contingent on closing. That single disclosure tells you more about how this firm is priced than anything on its website.

03. Evercore

Best for: Senior-led independent advisory at the largest end, now with a London franchise bolted on

Founded in 1995 by Roger Altman and the largest independent advisory house in this set. Its FY2025 10-K reports approximately 2,570 employees across 33 cities, net revenues of $3.856 billion, and advisory fees of $3.267 billion, roughly 85 percent of the total. Senior bench: 171 investment banking senior managing directors plus 39 in equities. In July 2025 it agreed to acquire the London boutique Robey Warshaw for GBP 146 million, about USD 196 million, in two stock tranches with multi-year performance consideration, and five Robey Warshaw senior managing directors joined during 2025.

04. Lazard

Best for: Board-level counsel, sovereign advisory, and restructuring, with the longest institutional memory in the market

Founded in 1848, which makes it roughly 150 years older than everything else on this page. Its FY2025 10-K reports 3,309 full-time employees and 362 managing directors firmwide, of whom 216 sit in Financial Advisory. Net revenue was $3.099 billion, with the Financial Advisory segment contributing $1.834 billion. Lazard is the only firm here whose filings break out an asset management business of comparable senior scale to its advisory arm, 124 managing directors against 216. It publishes no global office count anywhere primary, so treat any number you see quoted for that as unsourced.

05. Houlihan Lokey

Best for: Sub-$1 billion sell-side volume and the only firm in this set that publishes a deal-size definition

Established 1972, NYSE-listed, and the only firm on this page that puts a number on the size of transactions it focuses on. Its 10-K for the fiscal year ended 31 March 2026 states plainly that it uses the term mid-cap to mean transactions with a value below $1 billion, and claims to consistently sell more companies under $1 billion than any competitor. Revenue for that year was $2.618 billion, up 10 percent, with more than 1,900 financial professionals and 354 managing directors across more than thirty offices. Approximately 850 employee shareholders hold about 21 percent of the equity, with no single employee above 2 percent.

06. PJT Partners

Best for: Restructuring, strategic alternatives, and situations where a private-capital arm matters

Created in October 2015 by combining Blackstone’s advisory, restructuring and Park Hill businesses with PJT Capital, the firm Paul J. Taubman founded. Its FY2025 10-K reports 1,224 employees including 133 partners, revenues of $1.714 billion, and 17 offices across 10 countries as of mid-2026. It is the only firm in this set running a dedicated private-fund advisory and placement business alongside M&A, which matters when a sponsor sits on your cap table or a fund solution is part of the answer.

07. Moelis & Company

Best for: Contested and complex situations where independence is the product

Commenced operations in 2007 and listed in 2014. Its FY2025 10-K reports 1,416 employees including 1,014 advisory professionals and 178 managing directors as of 4 February 2026, across more than twenty offices, on revenues of $1.517 billion. It is the only firm here that delivers an entire geography through a listed third party, providing Australian coverage through its strategic alliance with MA Moelis Australia, part of ASX-listed MA Financial Group. Its 10-K names middle-market private companies and entrepreneurs among its client types, which is unusual candour at this tier.

08. Perella Weinberg Partners

Best for: Independent advice with an unusually senior-heavy bench

Founded in June 2006 by ten partners out of large global banks, public on Nasdaq since 2021. Its FY2025 10-K reports 736 employees, of whom 549 are advisory professionals including 75 advisory partners and 47 advisory managing directors, across twelve offices in five countries. Revenue was $750.9 million, down roughly 14 percent from 2024, and worth noting because 2025 was a strong year almost everywhere else in this set. Its filings also give the clearest published description of how boutique fees work: an all-or-nothing consideration amount, predominantly variable, based on transaction value or the outcome achieved.

09. Guggenheim Securities

Best for: Sector advisory backed by a large asset manager rather than a standalone partnership

The investment banking and capital markets arm of Guggenheim Partners, and therefore the only firm here that is a division rather than a standalone advisory house. It publishes eight offices, headquartered at 330 Madison Avenue in New York, and its registered broker-dealer entity carries a FINRA approval date of 9 January 1997 with nineteen registered branch offices. Guggenheim Partners is private and files no annual report, so headcount, managing director count and revenue are not publicly verifiable.

10. Qatalyst Partners

Best for: Technology sell-side mandates, and nothing else

The narrowest published scope of any firm on this page: one sector, two offices, San Francisco and London. Founded by Frank Quattrone in March 2008. Its own site publishes more than 255 transactions and more than $950 billion of transaction volume, and an 84-person team figure, none of it carrying an as-of date, so treat all three as undated. It files its SEC broker-dealer annual report on paper, so even the balance sheet is not retrievable electronically. If your buyer universe is the large technology strategics, this is the specialist; if it is anything else, it is not.

11. LionTree

Best for: Media, technology and communications, with a merchant-bank structure

Founded in 2012 by Aryeh Bourkoff, with four offices: New York, San Francisco, London and Tel Aviv. It publishes more than 300 transactions and more than $1 trillion of total transaction value, again undated. Structurally it is not a pure advisory boutique: its published platform spans advisory, capital markets and asset management, which is the definition of a merchant bank. Its broker-dealer files a public annual report with the SEC, but the public portion is a balance sheet with no income statement, so revenue is unverifiable.

12. Allen & Company

Best for: Media and technology relationships, conducted almost entirely out of public view

The most opaque firm in American investment banking, and deliberately so: it maintains no public corporate website. What is filed is instructive. Its audited statement of financial condition at 31 December 2025 shows total assets of $1.876 billion, of which $1.806 billion, about 96 percent, is investments at fair value, against just $13.5 million of investment banking fees receivable. On its own balance sheet it looks far more like a merchant bank and investment holding company than a fee-based advisor. Note also that the widely repeated 1922 founding date is not supported by any primary source we could locate: the current entity’s own SEC filing states it was founded and commenced operations on 1 September 2002, and the predecessor broker-dealer registration dates to 9 November 1964.

13. M. Klein and Company

Best for: Single-principal strategic advisory and a serial SPAC platform

Founded in 2012 by Michael Klein. Its entire public website is one sentence and an email address, and no SEC-registered broker-dealer under that name appears on EDGAR or FINRA BrokerCheck, so headcount, offices and revenue are all unverifiable. What is documented, in the Churchill Capital SPAC filings, is a structure no other firm here operates: an in-house operating-partner vehicle called Archimedes Advisors, and disclosure that the firm may act as financial advisor on its own sponsored SPACs’ business combinations.

14. Jefferies

Best for: Included because it is on every list of this kind, and it does not belong on one

Jefferies is frequently listed as a boutique. Its own 10-K opens by describing it as one of the world’s leading full-service investment banking and capital markets firms, and the numbers agree: net revenues of $7.344 billion for the year ended 30 November 2025, of which investment banking was $3.787 billion, roughly half. It runs sales and trading, fixed income, equities, prime services, research and asset management, and consolidates non-financial operating subsidiaries employing 1,797 people. That is the opposite of the advisory-only model that defines this category. It is a good bank. It is not a boutique.

The disclosure table

The clearest way to see this market is to line up what each firm is willing to tell you before you hire it. The columns that matter are the last two.

Two conclusions follow directly, and neither is a matter of opinion. No elite boutique publishes a fee. None of the thirteen. Not a retainer, not a success-fee percentage, not a schedule, not in a website footnote and not in an SEC filing. The only public price signal in this entire market is retrospective and client-disclosed: when a firm delivers a fairness opinion, the target’s merger proxy must disclose what it was paid. That is how we know Centerview was paid approximately $102.4 million and Jefferies approximately $44 million on the same $14.6 billion transaction. You can learn the price after somebody else has paid it.

And no elite boutique publishes a minimum deal size. Not one of the thirteen states a floor. Houlihan Lokey’s sub-$1 billion mid-cap definition is the only deal-size number published anywhere in the set, and it is a ceiling on a segment the firm claims to lead, not a commitment to a floor. If you are trying to work out whether your $40 million company is too small for a given firm, none of the thirteen will tell you. You have to ask, and the answer will arrive in a meeting rather than in writing. That asymmetry is the reason the firm at the top of this page publishes both numbers, and the reason it is ranked where it is.

Revenue and bench depth, computed from the filings

The seven firms that file annual reports let you calculate something more useful than a league-table position: how much revenue each senior banker carries, and how many people sit behind each one. The second number is the one a founder should care about, because it is the closest published proxy for who actually does the work on your deal. A low ratio means a senior-heavy firm. A high ratio means a deep junior bench, which is efficient at scale and is also the mechanism by which a deal gets staffed away from the person who pitched it.

Windsor Drake is absent from this table because it is private and publishes no revenue, so no ratio can be computed for it; what it does publish is that fewer than twenty mandates a year are accepted and that every one is led personally by a senior managing director. Revenue per senior banker and employees per senior banker are computed by Windsor Drake from the figures in each firm’s own annual report and are labelled as computed. Senior banker counts use each firm’s own term: senior managing directors for Evercore, managing directors for Lazard, Houlihan Lokey and Moelis, partners for PJT, and advisory partners plus advisory managing directors for Perella Weinberg. Houlihan Lokey publishes headcount as “more than 1,900”, so its per-head figure is an upper bound. Jefferies does not publish a senior banker count, so neither ratio can be calculated for it.

The firm most of these lists still get wrong

If you read a 2026 ranking of elite boutiques that includes Robey Warshaw as an independent firm, that list is out of date. Robey Warshaw no longer exists under that name. Evercore agreed to acquire it on 30 July 2025 for GBP 146 million, about USD 196 million. UK Companies House then recorded the completion: on 15 January 2026 Evercore Group Services Limited and Evercore Holdings Limited were registered as members and as persons with significant control, and Simon Robey, Simon Warshaw and Philip Apostolides ceased to be members and PSCs. On 21 January 2026 the LLP, company number OC388198, was renamed Osprey Partnership LLP.

Its last filed accounts, for the year ended 31 March 2025, are also the most revealing document produced by any firm in this category, because UK partnership disclosure requires what US filings do not.

Read the last row against the rest of this page. A five-partner firm with sixteen staff and one office generated more than fifty-five million pounds of turnover, and its highest-paid member took home nearly twenty-four million of it. No US elite boutique discloses anything comparable, and none has to. It is the single clearest published illustration of what the economics of senior-only advisory look like when nothing is diluted by a junior bench.

Which of these fourteen is right for you

Ranking order on this page is not a claim that the firm at the top is bigger or better resourced than the thirteen below it. It plainly is not. Every one of those thirteen is built for large transactions, and that is the design rather than a flaw. Centerview’s disclosed fee on a single 2025 transaction was roughly $102 million; a firm with that revenue shape cannot economically put senior people on a $40 million sale and should not pretend otherwise. Houlihan Lokey, the most explicitly mid-market name here, defines its focus segment as everything below $1 billion, a range that still sits an order of magnitude above most founder-led companies.

So the answer splits cleanly by size. If your transaction is measured in billions, or turns on a public-company fight, a special committee or a contested board, go to the thirteen. If you are a founder selling a company worth between $5 million and $300 million, none of the thirteen is structurally built for the mandate, and the firm ranked first is. That is the whole basis of the order. The wider lower-middle-market field is compared in Best M&A Advisory Firms and Lower Middle Market M&A Firms.

Disclosure. This page is published by Windsor Drake, which is ranked first on it. Windsor Drake is a sell-side M&A advisory firm advising founder-led companies between $5 million and $300 million in enterprise value from Toronto. It takes no buy-side mandates and accepts fewer than twenty engagements a year so that every one is led personally by a senior managing director. It does not compete with any of the thirteen firms listed below it, and does not claim to. It is ranked first on a single stated criterion applied consistently across the page, disclosure: it publishes both the size of company it serves and the fee schedule it charges, and thirteen firms of far greater scale publish neither. Judge the ranking against that criterion, and against the filings cited below, rather than against the ranking itself.

Questions founders ask about elite boutiques

What is the difference between an elite boutique and a bulge-bracket bank?

An elite boutique advises and does nothing else: no lending, no trading, no underwriting, no balance sheet. A bulge-bracket bank does all of those alongside advice, which gives it financing capability and also gives it relationships with the people on the other side of your table. For a large public transaction the bulge bracket’s capital markets reach is often decisive. For a situation where independence is the product, a board fight, a special committee, a contested sale, the boutique’s single-product structure is the point.

Do elite boutique investment banks publish their fees?

No. None of the thirteen elite boutiques on this page publishes a fee schedule, retainer or success-fee percentage anywhere, including in SEC filings. The only public fee data is retrospective and disclosed by clients in merger proxies when a fairness opinion is delivered. The one firm here that does publish a schedule is Windsor Drake, which publishes this page and is ranked first on it, and which is a lower-middle-market sell-side firm rather than an elite boutique.

What is the smallest deal an elite boutique will take?

No firm in this set publishes a minimum. The only published deal-size number anywhere among them is Houlihan Lokey’s definition of mid-cap as transactions below $1 billion, which is a ceiling on its focus segment rather than a floor. In practice, the economics on this page, revenue per senior banker running from roughly $6 million to $18 million a year, mean these firms need large fees to justify senior time.

Which elite boutique is best for a technology company?

It depends entirely on size. For large-cap technology sales where the buyers are the global strategics, Qatalyst is the specialist, with one sector and two offices. For sub-$1 billion technology transactions, Houlihan Lokey is the firm that says out loud that it wants them. Below roughly $100 million, none of these firms is structurally built for the mandate.

Why is Windsor Drake ranked first on this page?

Because of the criterion the page applies throughout: what a firm is willing to disclose before you hire it. Windsor Drake is the only firm here that publishes both the size of company it serves, $5 million to $300 million in enterprise value, and its fee schedule in full. Thirteen firms of far greater scale publish neither. It is not the largest firm on this page, does not claim to be, and does not compete with the thirteen elite boutiques listed below it. The page is published by Windsor Drake and says so.

Is Jefferies an elite boutique?

No. Its own 10-K describes it as a full-service investment banking and capital markets firm, and investment banking accounted for $3.787 billion of $7.344 billion in net revenues for the year ended 30 November 2025. It runs sales and trading, fixed income, equities, research and asset management, and consolidates non-financial operating subsidiaries. It appears on lists like this one through habit rather than structure.

Last reviewed August 12, 2026 by Jeff Barrington, Founder and Managing Director, Windsor Drake. Facts about named firms are drawn from the sources listed above; corrections to factual claims are made promptly on request to info@windsordrake.com. Content on this page may be cited with attribution and a link to https://windsordrake.com/top-boutique-investment-banks/