Mitchell Baruchowitz

Principal Owner

2023

Principal Owner of Westchester's first professional soccer team and its first homegrown professional sports team of any type. Westchester SC aims to bring a USL League One men’s professional team for the 2025 season and will look to bring a professional women’s team in the coming years. Together with our passionate local soccer community, our aim is to become the cornerstone of Westchester’s already thriving soccer ecosystem and ascend to the highest tier of the USL’s professional soccer pyramid. We are committed to building both world-class boys’ and girls’ developmental pipeline for Westchester’s incredible local player base.

Managing Partner

2016

Responsible Investing in the Emerging Cannabis Industry Merida Capital Partners is a private equity fund targeting fundamental growth drivers underpinning the rapid development of the cannabis industry. Our investment thesis focuses on products and services associated with the evolution of cannabis as an agricultural product, a natural plant-based medicine, a constituent in pharmaceutical formulations, and a recreational consumer product. Members of the Merida Capital Partners executive team have been working with state legal cannabis companies since 2009 and investing in cannabis related companies since 2012. We have honed our investing philosophy through our immersion in the most complex areas of the cannabis industry, the state regulated licensing process for medical cultivation and cannabis-based pharmaceutical development. Our team has competed for and won limited licenses in two of the strictest medical-only states in the United States, successes built from our decades of experience in traditional industries of technology, real estate, structured finance and banking. While we have deep experience in the entire cannabis supply chain, our investment emphasis is grounded primarily in four distinct verticals-medical cultivation, cultivation infrastructure; data and technology services; and pharmaceutical development and life sciences. Along with limited- license medical cultivators, we seek compelling long term value as the industry matures by investing in well-managed, revenue generating companies who offer cannabis-based businesses essential products or services. www.meridacap.com

Senior Managing Director, Head of Investment Banking

2013 - 2017

I specialize in structure-agnostic capital advisory for small and mid-size companies who have already achieved conceptual validation and are now moving through an explosive growth stage. We typically look to identify assymetric risk-reward opportunities that have significant risk-adjusted returns and downside protection and then evangelize these opportunities to a broad base of HNW and smaller institutional investors. We often participate in PIPEs, Registered Direct offerings, private placements and opportunistic asset purchases/dispositions. We also focus on utilizing our complex transactional experience for special situations, restructuring and larger recapitalizations. We currently represent clients in almost every sector, including cannabis, consumer, retail, edtech, adtech, SaaS, industrial materials, specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing and clean power. As an active angel investor, I also look for quality investments that tend to be a bit earlier than our sprout stage banking clients. As of early 2014, I have participated in over 50 transactions since 2010 and invested as an Angel in ~30 transactions, included 5 in 2015 year to date.

Member of the Board of Governors

2015 - 2017

Member of the Board of Governors of one of the just two licensed Minnesota medicinal cannabis cultivators and operator of patient care centers. My specific areas of focus are finance, governance and compliance.

Head of Investment Banking and Senior Managing Director

2011 - 2013

I specialize in advising Early Stage/Sprout Stage Companies through capital raising, strategic transactions and other related issues these companies face during these stages. I am also an active Angel investor in more than a dozen companies in various stage of development. In addition we have a deep bench of legal and transactional experience to assist companies in the financial elements of M&A, bankruptcy and reorganization and any opportunistic transactions that emanate from the dislocation of our current economic environment.

General Counsel

2010 - 2013

Deputy General Counsel

2007 - 2010

Corporate Counsel

2007 - 2007

Corporate Counsel/CCO

2005 - 2007

attorney

2007 - 2007