Divya Nettimi, the primary girl to launch a Billion-Dollar Hedge Fund
Divya Nettimi began her personal hedge fund Monday with greater than $1 billion of commitments, making it the most important launch of a woman-led agency within the trade’s historical past and among the many largest of any to debut this yr.
Avala Global has begun investing the vast majority of the money, with the remaining anticipated to reach early within the first quarter, in line with folks aware of the matter, who requested to not be recognized as a result of the fund’s inception hasn’t been introduced publicly. A consultant for the New York-based agency declined to remark.
Nettimi, a portfolio supervisor who oversaw greater than $4 billion at Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global Investors earlier than leaving final yr, will wager on and in opposition to shares within the client, enterprise companies and expertise, media and telecom sectors, whereas additionally backing personal corporations, the folks stated. The cash gathered to this point doesn’t embody investments from Viking shoppers as a result of anti-competition agreements prohibit her from soliciting them till November.
Her capacity to kick-start the agency now could be all of the extra exceptional as a pointy decline in fairness markets has made fundraising tougher, with among the trade’s most prolific tech-focused stock-pickers experiencing their worst yr on document. This yr’s largest new hedge fund is Alex Karnal’s Braidwell, which began in April with $3.5 billion.
Another extremely anticipated debut is Mala Gaonkar’s SurgoCap Partners. She’s anticipated to launch her agency in 2023 with no less than $1 billion.
Nettimi, 36, and Gaonkar, 52, will probably be a part of an unique membership of ladies leaders in an trade dominated by males, with their debuts coming virtually a decade after Leda Braga took the helm of Systematica Investments, then an $8.3 billion assortment of quant funds that was spun out from Michael Platt’s BlueCrest Capital Management.
Avala’s shoppers will face some constraints. They received’t be capable of pull their money for the primary two years and, in the event that they select to take action after, it’s going to take a further two years for them to withdraw all of their capital, the folks stated.
Nettimi joins a rising listing of Viking alumni to set out on their very own in recent times. The most distinguished amongst them is Dan Sundheim, who stepped down as chief funding officer to discovered D1 Capital Partners in 2018, constructing it right into a $22 billion behemoth. In 2020, former Viking co-CIOs Ben Jacobs and Tom Purcell began Anomaly Capital Management and Alua Capital Management, respectively. Last yr, former Viking portfolio supervisor Grant Wonders launched Voyager Global Management.
