Change is coming to the world of hedge funds, in the form of women-led firms. Though only 80 out of thousands of hedge funds are led by women, it’s the most of any point in history. As investors realize that diversity has a positive affect on performance as well as society, more of them are entrusting women with their money. An article in Bloomberg profiles a handful of the prominent recent and upcoming launches:
Mala Gaonkar will launch Surgo Capital in 2022, which will be headquartered in NYC. Gaonkar spent over 20 years at Lone Pine Capital where she oversaw $33 billion in investments, primarily in publicly traded companies. The expectation is that she’ll bet more on private companies at Surgo.
Divya Nettimi will launch her fund in 2022 as well, after spending several years at Viking Global Investors managing $4 billion heading up Viking’s global technology, media, and telecommunications investments. According to sources, her new firm—name TBD—will focus on both public and private investments.
Xiaoying Tian launched Saturn V Capital Management in October of this year. With an initial $80 million, the firm focuses on biotech and uses statistical models that Tian developed while working towards a Ph.D. in statistics at Stanford. Those models predict the outcomes of various clinical trials to bet on undervalued biotech companies.
Jane Wu launched her Springhill Fund in March 2021 with $550 million under management, making it one of Asia’s largest hedge fund startups this year. The firm’s focus is on Asian health-care stocks and is the public equities unit of Qiming.
Eureka Carrasquillo launched 1.5 Degrees, named after scientists’ warning about the Earth’s tipping point if global warming rises above 1.5C, on October 7th. As its name befits, the firm focuses on opportunities arising from climate change and companies affected—for better or worse—by rising sea levels, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and changes in consumer preferences.
Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi will launch Tudor T++, a hedge fund within Tudor Investment Corp., in the early part of 2022. Its focus will be on choosing tech companies in the process of digital transformation. Hoffmann-Burchardi has been at Tudor for over 20 years and will be the third money manager to have her own firm there. The firm will start with $300 million from outside investors in addition to an unknown amount from Tudor, with plans to utilize alternative data to target trends of digital and data disruption in the tech sector.
Lisa Audet is launching Tall Trees Capital Management in early 2022, and will make climate change-related investments in public stocks, as well as explore private investments. Audet spent 12 years at Discovery Capital and launches Tall Trees with $50 to $75 million under management in its first quarter.
Jillian McIntyre launched 221B Capital Partners this year with an initial $75 million plus other funding from unnamed backers. Though named for famed British detective Sherlock Holmes’s fictional address, 221B will be based in New York and focus mainly on technology, renewable energy, and industrial stocks for its global long-short equity fund. Having covered technology companies for her entire career, McIntyre says, “One of the things that we’re most well-known for is finding really good shorts.”
Ivelina Green will launch Pearlstone Alternative in mid-2022, with plans to invest in European credit, with strategies focused on complex, idiosyncratic credit opportunities where borrowers might not have other options, capitalizing on her experiences with trading during the 2008 financial crisis as well as the current environment.
