Gaonkar, 56, uses data science to invest around the theme of how technology can improve other sectors such as finance, manufacturing, healthcare and enterprise data.Now SurgoCap’s assets put it in the same league as Bobby Jain’s namesake fund, which debuted in 2024 with $5.3 billion, and Diego Megia’s $7 billion firm that launched the same year.
Read more: Hedge Fund Debuts in Largest Launch Led by a Woman
The Lone Pine Capital veteran deliberately kept the size of SurgoCap’s investment team small enough to sit around a table, she said in a podcast airing this week.
“Jeff Bezos has talked about teams with two pizza boxes,” Gaonkar said on the In Good Company podcast, in which Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, introduced her as the leader of a $6 billion company. “I think we like to stay in one pizza box in terms of team size.” The smaller team is “so fruitful for generating new ideas,” she added. “There’s something about human collaboration that works best on a smaller scale.”
A representative for Gaonkar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Few startup hedge funds have grown so quickly in recent years, partly due to the retreat from U.S. pensions and endowments that have tied up money in private equity.
Still, some have succeeded, including Divya Nettimi’s Avala Global, which has doubled its size since launching in 2022 and now oversees $2 billion.
Michael Gelband, who opened his ExodusPoint Capital Management in 2018 with $8 billion, still holds the title for the largest launch in the sector. His company now manages $11.9 billion.
Born in the US and raised largely in Bengaluru, India, Gaonkar spent more than two decades at Steve Mandel’s Lone Pine, eventually rising to become one of three portfolio managers overseeing the firm’s assets. She left in 2022.
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