Jeri Harman Receives PEWIN’s North Star Lifetime Achievement Award

Jeri Harman, founder and chairman of Avante Capital Partners, has been named the recipient of the North Star Lifetime Achievement Award by the PEWIN Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Private Equity Women Investor Network.¹

The award will be presented at the Brilliance Soirée in New York City on September 23, 2026, alongside honorees recognized for advancing women’s leadership across private markets.¹ For everyone at Avante, the recognition lands differently. It belongs to the person who built the firm from the ground up and has spent seventeen years showing what a different kind of leadership in private credit can look like.

PEWIN’s North Star Award recognizes individuals whose careers have shaped the private markets industry over the long term, not just within a single fund cycle or firm.¹ The Foundation cited Jeri for more than three decades of leadership and her role in moving women into partner seats, investment committees, and boardrooms across the industry.¹ The citation accompanying the award put it simply: she didn’t just succeed in the system, she built a new one.

What the Award Represents

Private credit has grown into a significant piece of the capital stack for lower middle market companies over the past decade, filling gaps left by traditional bank lending following tighter regulatory capital requirements.² Firms founded and led by women remain a small fraction of that landscape, particularly at the ownership and decision-making level.³ Jeri founded Avante in 2009, during a period when institutional capital was scarce and women-led credit platforms were rare enough to be considered anomalies rather than a category.

Alongside co-founders Ivelisse Rodriguez Simon and Paul Hayama, she grew it into one of the largest women- and minority-owned private credit platforms in the country, with $1.5 billion in assets under management today.

That growth mattered to Avante’s own trajectory. It also mattered to the broader push toward more inclusive access to capital and leadership in private markets, an effort institutional allocators have increasingly prioritized in manager selection.³ The mentorship networks Jeri built along the way are now credited by a generation of women executives with helping shape their own rise into partner and investment-committee roles.

A Personal Note From the Firm

Everyone at Avante has a story about a door Jeri opened that hadn’t been open before. Some of us watched her win deals by adding value and transparency, not by over-levering or under-pricing. Others watched her sit across from an LP who had never allocated to a woman-led credit fund and change that outcome through patience, preparation, and a real understanding of what that LP needed, not persuasion alone. What we’ve come to understand, working alongside her, is that leadership built this way tends to outlast any single fund or fund cycle.

Jeri has led with the kind of grace and humility that doesn’t always get recognized publicly, which makes this recognition land with more impact for the people who’ve worked closest to her. She built Avante on a foundation of strong partnership and a culture rooted in the belief that delivering superior returns and helping others rise are not mutually exclusive, and that belief shows up in how the firm approaches every sponsor relationship and every LP conversation. The North Star Award recognizes a career. For Avante, it recognizes the person who taught an entire firm how to operate with conviction and generosity at the same time.

To the industry, she is a pioneer. To us, she is the founder who inspired and empowered us to help build this firm, opened doors that had never opened, and still leads with grace and humility.

Congratulations, Jeri. This one is well earned, and we could not be prouder to call you our founder and chairman.