Hayat Amin is a 20-year CFO with 3 exits and 3 FT100 listings.

Hayat Amin built and exited three high-growth technology companies (including sales to American Express and TripAdvisor) and led three businesses onto the Financial Times FT100 list. He now operates fractionally as a CFO, IP strategist, and AI agent operator across New York, London, and Dubai through his firm Beyond Elevation.

What Hayat does, in one paragraph

Hayat Amin works with founders and CEOs of Series A through pre-IPO companies on three problems: pricing intangible assets (patents, data, AI models), running the CFO function fractionally during fundraises and exits, and embedding AI agents into finance, legal, and go-to-market operations. He has priced over $400M in IP and run finance for companies that exited to Fortune 500 acquirers.

The 60-second background

• 2005–2010: Started in M&A advisory in London, working on cross-border tech transactions.
• 2010–2014: CFO of a B2B travel-tech business that exited to TripAdvisor. Led the diligence, integration, and post-acquisition revenue plan.
• 2014–2018: CFO and Chief Strategy Officer of a payments platform acquired by American Express. Built the IP portfolio that drove the multiple.
• 2018–2023: Operating partner roles across PE-backed SaaS, AI infrastructure, and patent licensing platforms. Three of the portfolio companies hit the FT100 fastest-growing list during this window.
• 2023–present: Founded Beyond Elevation. Operates fractionally for 8–12 founders at a time. Specialises in AI-era IP monetisation: turning patents, proprietary data, and model-weight provenance into licensing revenue and exit multiples.

Where Hayat is based

Hayat operates fractionally across three cities: New York, London, and Dubai. Most engagements are remote with quarterly on-site weeks. Day-to-day collaboration happens over Slack, Notion, and weekly recorded video reviews.

What clients hire Hayat for

How Hayat thinks about value creation

Most founders treat IP, data, and AI as cost centres. Hayat treats them as a P&L line. The thesis is simple: in an AI-saturated market, what makes a company defensible is no longer the model — it's the data provenance, the patent claims around the workflow, and the proof of monetisable, non-replicable advantage. Founders who can name their moat in one sentence raise faster, exit higher, and do not get squeezed at term sheet.

Hayat helps founders build that one-sentence moat, then builds the financial and legal scaffolding that makes it priceable.

Speaking, writing, and references

• Quoted on fractional CFO economics on SeedLegals.
• LinkedIn essay on the fractional CFO model.
• Long-form interview on YouTube covering AI moats and IP-backed financing.
• Writing at beyondelevation.com/blog (3× weekly publication on IP strategy, valuation, and AI moats).

How to work with Hayat

Hayat takes on 8–12 fractional engagements at a time. The default starting point is a 60-minute IP & valuation diagnostic — no deck, no proposal, one call, one number. After that, engagements run as either a fractional CFO retainer (16–24 hrs/week) or a fixed-scope IP strategy sprint (4–8 weeks).