An investment thesis is not a financial model. It is a set of claims about why a business is worth acquiring, at what price, and on what assumptions — claims that will be tested by market conditions, competitive dynamics, and integration realities for years after the deal closes. The difference between a thesis that holds and one that collapses under pressure is usually not the quality of the spreadsheet. It is the quality of the underlying thinking: whether the assumptions are grounded in operating reality, whether the risks are honestly characterized, and whether the governance system around the investment will maintain accountability to the original case when results diverge from projection. Anubhav Mittal has built and stress-tested investment cases across hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions at Archer Daniels Midland and Kellogg Company. That experience has produced a specific and operationally grounded view of what makes a thesis credible.
The Anatomy of a Credible Investment Case
A credible investment thesis begins with a clear and honest account of why the target is strategically valuable — not in general terms, but specifically: what capability, market position, customer relationship, or asset the acquirer cannot build organically as efficiently or as quickly as it can buy. If that specific rationale cannot be stated clearly, the acquisition rationale is probably not strong enough to survive the scrutiny it will face internally and externally.
The financial model that supports the thesis is only as strong as its assumptions. Revenue growth projections must be grounded in market data and customer behavior, not in the target management team’s optimism or the acquirer’s desire to justify a price. Cost synergy estimates must be tied to specific operational actions — not broad efficiency targets — and must account for the one-time costs required to achieve them. Working capital and capital expenditure assumptions must reflect the operational requirements of the business as it will actually run post-close, not as it ran pre-close under different ownership incentives.
At ADM, where Anubhav Mittal leads the M&A function across a global business in commodity-intensive markets, the discipline required to build a credible case is amplified by market volatility. An acquisition thesis in agribusiness must account for commodity price cycles that can materially alter the return profile of a deal within the first 12 months of ownership. Building a thesis that remains defensible across a range of commodity price scenarios — rather than only at current spot prices — is a basic requirement of investment analysis in this industry.
How Operating Experience Sharpens Thesis Development
The executives who build the most credible investment theses are generally those who have run businesses, not just analyzed them. The difference is not abstract. Someone who has led a finance organization for a large business unit understands, from direct experience, the gap between what a financial model projects and what a business actually does — the ways that cost assumptions overestimate efficiency gains, the way revenue synergies depend on sales force behaviors that cannot be mandated from the top, and the way working capital behaves differently at scale than in a model.
Mittal’s CFO experience at ADM Nutrition — managing financial performance across an approximately $8 billion global business serving B2B and B2C markets — built exactly this kind of operating intuition. His mandate included commercial finance, operations finance, FP&A, and strategic M&A for the business unit: a set of responsibilities that continuously connects investment assumptions to operational realities. That experience directly informs the quality of the investment cases he builds and evaluates in his current corporate development role.
At Kellogg, his corporate development work spanned global investment evaluation, portfolio strategy, and turnaround execution — a combination that required building investment cases not only for acquisitions but for internal restructuring programs and capital redeployment decisions. The analytical discipline required is the same: clearly stated assumptions, honest risk characterization, and a governance structure that will hold the organization accountable to the commitments made at approval.
The Stress Test as a Standard Practice
The most reliable way to evaluate an investment thesis is to try to break it. A stress test is not a pessimistic scenario run to satisfy a governance checklist. It is a structured attempt to identify the specific conditions under which the thesis fails — and to determine whether those conditions are plausible enough to change the decision or simply require mitigation planning.
For a commodity-adjacent business like ADM’s, stress testing an acquisition thesis means modeling what happens to deal returns when input costs rise by a range of plausible scenarios, when the target’s largest customer reduces volume, when integration costs run over estimate, and when the assumed synergy timeline extends by 12 months. Each of those scenarios is individually plausible. The question the stress test answers is whether the deal still makes sense under conditions that are realistic rather than ideal.
Mittal’s role overseeing ADM’s enterprise capital allocation and investment governance includes exactly this kind of structured review — bringing investment cases through a rigorous approval process that requires clear assumption documentation, scenario analysis, and risk characterization before capital is committed. That governance function serves as a systematic quality filter on the investment cases the M&A team produces.
The Long View: Tracking Returns After Close
An investment thesis does not end at close. The commitments embedded in the business case — the synergy targets, the return on invested capital projections, the working capital assumptions — must be tracked against actual performance through the post-close period. Without that accountability, investment governance loses its disciplinary function: future investment cases are built without the feedback loop of knowing whether prior assumptions were accurate.
At ADM, Mittal leads the capital allocation governance function that provides exactly this feedback loop — tracking investment performance against committed returns, identifying where assumptions diverged from outcomes, and using that information to improve the quality of future investment cases. That closed-loop approach to investment governance is, in the long run, how a corporate development function at a global company builds and maintains analytical credibility.
The result is an M&A practice that does not simply execute transactions — it learns from them, refines its assumptions, and applies that refinement to the next investment case. That discipline, sustained over time, is what separates a high-performing corporate development function from one that simply moves capital.
About Anubhav Mittal
Anubhav Mittal is a senior finance, corporate development, and value-creation executive with more than two decades of experience leading strategy, M&A, capital allocation, restructuring, and business transformation across global public companies. He currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Previously, he held CFO-level and senior finance leadership roles within ADM and at Kellogg Company, and began his career at Booz & Company. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School with a concentration in Finance and Strategy, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, graduating in the top 5% of his class. He holds the CFA and CMA designations and is based in Chicago, Illinois.
