Her SurgoCap Companions was the largest-ever woman-led debut in an business dominated by males when it launched with $1.8 billion in January 2023.
Gaonkar, 56, makes use of knowledge science to speculate across the theme of how expertise can improve different sectors equivalent to financials, industrials, well being care and enterprise knowledge.
Now SurgoCap’s property put it in the identical league as Bobby Jain’s eponymous fund, which debuted with $5.3 billion in 2024 and Diego Megia’s $7 billion agency that launched the identical 12 months.
Learn Extra: Hedge Fund Debuts in Largest Launch Led by a Girl
The Lone Pine Capital veteran has deliberately saved the dimensions of SurgoCap’s funding workforce sufficiently small to sit down round a desk, she stated in a podcast that aired this week.
“Jeff Bezos has talked about two-pizza-box groups,” Gaonkar stated on the In Good Firm podcast, wherein Nicolai Tangen, who heads Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, launched her as operating a $6 billion agency. “I believe we like to remain in a single pizza field when it comes to workforce dimension.”The smaller workforce is “so fruitful for brand spanking new concept technology,” she added. “There’s something about human collaboration that works greatest on a smaller scale.”
A consultant for Gaonkar didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Few startup hedge funds have swelled so shortly in recent times, partly due to pullback from US pensions and endowments which have money caught in non-public fairness.
Nonetheless, some have succeeded, together with Divya Nettimi’s Avala International, which doubled its dimension since its 2022 launch and now oversees $2 billion.
Michael Gelband, who opened his ExodusPoint Capital Administration with $8 billion in 2018, nonetheless holds the title for the business’s greatest launch. His agency now manages $11.9 billion.
Gaonkar, born within the US and raised principally in Bengaluru, India, labored at Steve Mandel’s Lone Pine for greater than 20 years, in the end ascending to grow to be one in every of three portfolio managers overseeing the agency’s property. She left in 2022.
