Bobby Jain has gathered $5.3 billion in commitments for his new multistrategy hedge fund, marking the biggest fundraising haul since ExodusPoint Capital Management’s record debut.
The firm won backing from sovereign wealth giant Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and has lined up bank wealth platforms including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS Group AG and HSBC Holdings Plc, according to people familiar with the matter. Jain Global will start trading July 1.
The firm also has endowments, foundations, family offices and pensions as investors.
Representatives for Jain Global, ADIA, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. HSBC didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The premiere caps a busy year for Jain — former co-chief investment officer at Millennium Management — who has traveled the world pitching his fund. He initially aimed to gather as much as $10 billion. But after struggling to hit that goal, he cut client fees to entice investors and reduced his target to between $5 billion and $6 billion.
Even with the revised goal, Jain Global is the biggest launch since 2018. Jain topped fellow Millennium alumnus Diego Megia, whose Taula Capital Management began trading this month with $5 billion. Megia spun out his macro pod from Millennium and received $3 billion from his former employer.
Jain has been raising money in a challenging environment, as interest rates remain elevated and private equity deals have slowed to a trickle. New hedge funds also face stiff competition from bigger multistrategy funds with established track records. Meanwhile, hot demand for private credit is enticing investors seeking alternative strategies, Jain said at a conference last week.
Despite those obstacles, Jain Global is starting off big — having hired 215 people, including 42 portfolio managers. The firm has seven businesses that will go live on July 1, including an Asia-Pacific unit that will essentially act as a multimanager platform and trade six strategies, with the profits feeding into the Jain fund.
The firm raised money via a so-called drawdown fund, meaning it will tap the cash as needed over a year.
Michael Gelband’s ExodusPoint still enjoys the distinction of biggest-ever hedge fund debut. Yet another Millennium alumnus, Gelband raised $8 billion for a multistrategy fund that began in 2018 and has fixed-income and equity businesses.
Jain launched his own shop after leaving Millennium, where he shared the CIO title with founder Izzy Englander. Over his seven years there, he helped the multistrategy behemoth push into new strategies, recruit, upgrade technologies and develop its central risk book. Millennium’s assets doubled to about $60 billion during his tenure.
Prior to Millennium, Jain spent more than two decades at Credit Suisse Group AG, where he held many senior titles including head of global proprietary trading and global head of asset management.
A message from Advisor Perspectives and VettaFi: To learn more about this and other topics, check out our videos.
Bloomberg News provided this article. For more articles like this please visit
bloomberg.com.
Read more articles by Hema Parmar
