Mala Gaonkar’s hedge fund assets hit $6 billion in three years

Gaonkar, 56, uses data science to invest around the theme of how technology can enhance other sectors such as financials, industrials, health care and enterprise data. Bloomberg

• Mala Gaonkar's SurgoCap hedge fund tripled assets to $6 billion in three years
• SurgoCap, the largest woman-led hedge fund, debuts with $1.8 billion.
• Gaonkar keeps her investment team small to foster collaboration and new ideas

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Mala Gaonkar’s hedge fund tripled its assets to about $6 billion just three years after it started trading, marking one of the fastest-growing debuts in history.

Her SurgoCap Partners was the largest-ever woman-led debut in an industry dominated by men when it launched with $1.8 billion in January 2023.

Gaonkar, 56, uses data science to invest around the theme of how technology can enhance other sectors such as financials, industrials, health care and enterprise data.

Now SurgoCap’s assets put it in the same league as Bobby Jain’s eponymous fund, which debuted with $5.3 billion in 2024 and Diego Megia’s $7 billion firm that launched the same year.

The Lone Pine Capital veteran has intentionally kept the size of SurgoCap’s investment team small enough to sit around a table, she said in a podcast that aired this week.

“Jeff Bezos has talked about two-pizza-box teams,” Gaonkar said on the In Good Company podcast, in which Nicolai Tangen, who heads Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, introduced her as running a $6 billion firm. “I think we like to stay in one pizza box in terms of team size.”

The smaller team is “so fruitful for new idea generation,” she added. “There is something about human collaboration that works best in smaller scale.”

A representative for Gaonkar didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Few startup hedge funds have swelled so quickly in recent years, partly because of pullback from US pensions and endowments that have cash stuck in private equity.

Still, some have succeeded, including Divya Nettimi’s Avala Global, which doubled its size since its 2022 launch and now oversees $2 billion.

Michael Gelband, who opened his ExodusPoint Capital Management with $8 billion in 2018, still holds the title for the industry’s biggest launch. His firm now manages $11.9 billion.

Gaonkar, born in the US and raised mostly in Bengaluru, India, worked at Steve Mandel’s Lone Pine for more than two decades, ultimately ascending to become one of three portfolio managers overseeing the firm’s assets. She left in 2022.