Sternship Advisers

Tim Day, the founder and managing director, leads the corporate-advisory practice. Rob Hamilton — who joined through the 2020 Ashanti Capital merger — runs the Equity Capital Markets division and manages the Ashanti Investment Fund. Chairman Neil Hamilton, a 35-year veteran who chaired Oz Minerals and Western Power, sets strategic direction but does not appear to execute day-to-day mandates.

The firm leans on the deep personal networks its partners built during careers at UBS, Macquarie, Goldman Sachs, and Argonaut. The ECM division also taps an ultra-high-net-worth distribution network that the Ashanti team had been cultivating since 2015. The founding thesis was explicitly that senior bankers free of institutional conflicts could attract mandates from mid-market companies that bulge-bracket banks overlook.

Neither — Sternship is an independent advisory firm, not a family office or a venture firm. It earns fees on M&A and capital-markets mandates; it does not deploy its own permanent capital. The Ashanti Investment Fund, managed by Rob Hamilton, is a separate vehicle that may co-invest, but the core business is fee-based corporate finance.

Sternship itself executes direct M&A and ECM transactions — placements, IPOs, acquisitions, and sales. The related Ashanti Investment Fund can take investment positions, but the advisory practice does not operate as a fund-of-funds or LP allocator.

The ECM division works across pre-IPO, IPO, reverse takeover, convertible, and secondary-market placements for both listed and unlisted companies. The M&A practice is stage-agnostic, handling everything from strategic growth investments to full trade sales and management buyouts.

The firm does not publish an exclusion list. The deal sheet and team bios tilt heavily toward natural resources, mining services, industrials, engineering, and infrastructure. Consumer and healthcare appear only when a director — Hugo Packer in particular — brings coverage from his Goldman Sachs tenure.

The firm does not operate a separate philanthropic foundation. Its website states that it allocates a portion of profits to charitable endeavours focused on individual and community development, but no legal entity, grant totals, or governance structure are disclosed.