---
title: "Meet Co-Founder Tim Geraghty: Building Scythian's Capital Markets Engine"
description: Meet Tim Geraghty, co-founder of Scythian Capital Management, whose two decades in investment management and capital markets helped build the engine behind Scythian.
---

[SCM Insights & Market Perspectives](https://blog.scythiancm.com)

# [Meet Co-Founder Tim Geraghty: Building Scythian's Capital Markets Engine](https://blog.scythiancm.com/meet-co-founder-tim-geraghty-building-scythians-capital-markets-engine)

 Written by [Investment Team](https://blog.scythiancm.com/author/investment-team) | October 2, 2026

Tim Geraghty graduated from college in June 2007 and got his first job on Wall Street just in time for the Great Financial Crisis. He spent his first years working residential and commercial structured credit, dealing with everything from bankruptcy and litigation to asset repossessions. Over time, that experience turned into a specialty that few people had: financing the small and midsize commercial real estate deals everyone else had overlooked. 

We sat down with Tim, Scythian Capital Management’s Co-Founder and Managing Partner, to learn about that path and where it’s led him.

Can you tell us about your background and what shaped how you see this business?

I grew up in Yonkers, a blue-collar town on the outskirts of NYC. My dad worked in corporate finance at IBM. My mom was a schoolteacher. Very Main Street, very middle-class kind of background. It was a big stretch for them financially, but they sent me to a strong prep school, hoping discipline and a good education would open doors for me. It paid off, and the lessons I learned there continue to inform how I do business. 

What was it like starting your career right as the financial crisis hit?

I joined Deutsche Bank’s structured products group expecting to execute deals. Instead, I spent my first years in triage: bankruptcies, litigation, distressed residential and commercial credit, even chasing down assets in faraway jurisdictions. At the age of 22, it felt like a rough way to start a career, but, looking back, it was the best foundation I could have asked for, a market education most people don’t get until 20 years in.

By 2010, the market was recovering, and Deutsche had one of the biggest CRE and CMBS groups on the Street, full of people who’d go on to run significant parts of the business at firms like Blackstone, Oaktree, and Starwood. But the group was so large and so busy that nobody would focus on deals under $50 million. A few of us on the structured side saw that gap and decided to go after it ourselves, and I became the primary banker covering that sector. I was lending to some of the most opportunistic and sophisticated firms in our sector, watching them chase the deals everyone else was ignoring.

Is that how you met Anuj Gupta, your co-founder at Scythian?

Yes. He was managing Waterfall’s middle-market CRE business, and I was the one lending to it. By then, I’d formed my own thesis on this part of the market from watching sophisticated and opportunistic funds work it from the other side. Not long after, I joined Anuj on the buy side, and we spent years building the lending business together.

What do you bring to Scythian that other managers in this space don’t?

Most people who start origination businesses come from the entrepreneurial side. They’re good at finding deals and creating assets. Usually, though, they don’t have as much experience with the Wall Street side: operating a large debt book, managing big portfolios, sitting across from the money center banks that actually lend at scale. You’re in front of lenders constantly, and you need to know exactly where to go and how to defend your book, your structure, and your counterparty risk.

Scythian isn’t just an asset manager. We’re an asset creator, and when you can create your own assets instead of buying the market, you can be more selective and strategic. Across Deutsche and Waterfall, I’ve been on one side or the other of roughly $25 billion in debt, something like 60 securitizations totaling around $30 billion, syndicated across more than 500 unique counterparties. 

Pair that with the skills Anuj developed at GE, the discipline to underwrite the asset correctly in the first place, and you’ve got real underwriting, capital markets, and investment management experience under one roof. Most people in this market have only one of those. Add that to the wide range of deals, financial and legal structures, and businesses that we have dealt with – that experience gives us confidence we have the skills, knowledge, and team to build something really special. 

What does that combination mean for the people allocating capital to Scythian?

A lot of what allocators get pitched in this space is a single-strategy manager betting that today’s market holds up. We’re different. On one side, we’re lending our own balance sheet directly. On the other, we create and manage fee-generating, government-licensed lending programs that don’t depend on our own capital the same way. When credit tightens, the fee side keeps generating income. When it loosens, we can lean into balance sheet origination and acquisitions.

But having a good strategy isn’t the same as being able to fund it. That takes real capital markets infrastructure, the kind most originators never have to build because they’ve never operated at this size. We have. For an allocator, that’s the difference between backing a good idea and backing a firm that can execute it at scale.

You’ve talked about wanting Scythian’s ownership structure to look different from what you saw elsewhere. What do you mean by that?

Over many years in the industry, we have seen flawed alignment and incentive structures, siloed parts of the business, and poor communication.   
We are out to turn some of those detractors into core benefits with a focus on culture. We’re firm believers in planning for the future today, aligning key employees so they act like owners to create better outcomes for all stakeholders and merit-based incentive compensation.  
We intend to bring our values, what we have learned, and the best features we have seen to life at Scythian. 

What does your partnership with Anuj mean for the firm now?

Anuj and I have complementary skill sets and a deep desire to do things the right way while outperforming. We both understand the Wall Street and Main Street sides of the business. Most firms only really have one of those.

On a deal, that’s the difference between the right structure on the right asset and the wrong one. It’s the same on the firm level. Anuj and I come from completely different worlds geographically. I grew up in Yonkers; he grew up in Nairobi, but we ended up with the same conviction: that the lower and middle market deserved a firm that actually understood both sides of it. That’s what we built. That’s Scythian.

 

[View full post](https://blog.scythiancm.com/meet-co-founder-tim-geraghty-building-scythians-capital-markets-engine)

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