KIRSTEN BARTOK TOUW
Ms. Bartok Touw is the co-founder of New Vista Capital and one of the firm’s Managing Partners. She has a long history at the intersection of finance and investing in aerospace, defense and national security, as an investor, entrepreneur and senior executive.
Ms. Bartok Touw is also the co-founder, managing partner of AirFinance / AF Capital, an asset backed structured finance firm that partners with global aerospace and defense firms and U.S. EXIM, other global export credit agencies and development finance corporations. To date the firm has sourced, structured, diligenced, funded and serviced more than $1.5 billion in financing across a variety of structured products to global aerospace and defense companies, suppliers, and customers.
She currently serves at an Advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Strategic Capital on policy and strategy as they work to create additional levers to support emerging technologies and industries of strategic importance to national security.
Ms. Bartok Touw is on Silicon Valley Defense Group’s Advisory Board, the US EXIM Council on China Competition and the National Business Aviation Association’s Advisory Council, and is a member of Atlantic Aviation and Electra Aero’s Board of Directors. She previously was a member of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business Management Board and in 2015 was named to Corporate Jet Investor’s “Power List” as one of the industry’s top 10 innovators and the only woman on the list.
Prior to AirFinance, Ms. Bartok Touw was Vice President, Structured Finance & Corporate Development at Hawker Beechcraft Corporation, where she helped lead the company’s expansion into China, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and sales financing.
Prior to Hawker, Ms. Bartok Touw co-founded XOJET, Inc., the business jet fleet operator, and served on its board and as Chief Financial Officer, where she raised and structured more than $1.5 billion of equity and debt financing. XOJET is now a part of Vista Global.
Before co-founding XOJET, Inc., Ms. Bartok Touw spent over 12 years in private equity and venture capital at Alpine Investors and JPMorgan Partners/Chase Capital Partners technology team. Ms. Bartok Touw began her career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. She was a Council Foreign Relations member, a French American Foundation Young Fellow, a German Marshall Fellow and a Young Leader Fellow with the Committee on US China Relations.