Who is Mala Gaonkar, whose firm saw the biggest launch of a hedge fund led by a woman?

Indian-American portfolio manager Mala Gaonkar has a lot of feathers in her cap, but the most recent one is the largest debut of a hedge fund led by a woman. Her hedge fund SurgoCap Partners has $1.8 billion under management. 

SurgoCap, that started trading on Tuesday, “is an investment firm focused on the long-term and disruptive impacts of technology innovation across broad areas of the global markets”, its website reads.

According to a report in Bloomberg, SurgoCap will use data science to invest in sectors such as financials, industrials, health care and enterprise data that can be enhanced with technology. It will be on and against stocks and will invest around a quarter of its assets in private companies. 

Mala Gaonkar, along with Sema Sgaier initially co-founded Surgo Foundation in 2015. The foundation sought to bring a customer-driven approach to global health. It sought to combine smart philanthropy with a diverse team of data scientists, behavioural scientists, and technologists to integrate ideas from multiple disciplines to solve health problems.

Five years later, they founded Surgo Ventures, a Washington, DC-based non-profit that focused on solving health and social problems. It is led by co-founder and CEO Sema Sgaier, and is governed by a board of directors including Mala Gaonkar and Malcolm Gladwell. 

Surgo Foundation exists as a vehicle for Gaonkar’s own philanthropic priorities and Surgo Ventures continues to be an ‘action tank’. 

Who is Mala Gaonkar?

Mala Gaonkar was born in the US and raised mostly in Bengaluru. She was a Kauffman Fellow and attended Harvard University and Harvard Business School. 

Before founding SurgoCap Partners, Gaonkar was the founding partner at Lone Pine Capital for around 24 years, since 1998. She was the portfolio manager at the firm’s technology, media, internet and telecommunications exposure and the co-portfolio manager of Lone Pine’s long-only funds. 

Prior to that, Gaonkar worked for The Boston Consulting Group, and Chase Capital Partners. She is a trustee of Ariadne Labs, as well as of the Tate Foundation, The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Technology, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), and RAND. She is also a member of the advisory board of The Economist.

She was a Founders’ Council member at the Harvard University South Asia Initiative, a trustee of Artangel, and a member of the board of The Paris Review Foundation, as per the Tate's 2010 appointment announcement. 

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