Following its bang-up year in 2025 betting on markets outside the U.S., Tekne Capital is at it again.
The fund is up 47 percent through May, after a 50.8 percent gain last year, according to an investor. And that’s at a time when global macroeconomic concerns have rarely been more prominent.
In what might seem counterintuitive, some of Tekne’s best performers have been European companies, according to Beeneet Kothari, founder of the $1.7 billion hedge fund firm.
Europe’s dependence on foreign sources of oil means its economies have been hit hard by the rise in oil prices due to the U.S./Israel war with Iran. But like many of the winners in Tekne’s portfolio, Europe has companies that are benefiting from the AI revolution in ways that might not seem obvious. Europe lacks the type of companies that dominate the Mag7 in the U.S., but it has “world-class manufacturing and semiconductor firms,” said Kothari.
“European tech is now outperforming the Mag Seven by 21 points yearly,” he said. For example, one of Tekne’s best performers this year is BE Semiconductor, which specializes in hybrid bonding, a critical and highly complex step in chipmaking. “They are the only company in the world that can do it at their complexity level,” said Kothari. The stock is up 137 percent so far this year.
Another area where Tekne has found strong performers is Asia outside China. AI’s dependence on physical technology — data centers, chips, wiring, cables, and optical fiber — plays to Asia’s strengths in manufacturing, he said.
One example is Japanese company Nibo, a roughly ¥2 billion firm whose stock tripled from 10,000 to 30,000 yen in just a few months after Tekne bought it. The company makes glass yarn, which previously was used in textile manufacturing but is now a critical component in semiconductors because its high-temperature performance and resistance to warping are essential for Nvidia GPUs. Founded in the Meiji era, the company is 100 years old with deep process know‑how that is hard to replicate.
“You can't just recreate this overnight,” Kothari said.
Tekne has gotten good at “identifying these little companies that… were not so economically relevant, and now they are irreplaceable.”
“Finding these little hidden gems” has been a big source of Tekne’s outperformance, he said.
Tekne continues to invest in China, which has been less affected by the rise of oil than other Asian countries as the country continues to decrease its dependence on fossil fuels. “Their consumption of oil is at a 14-year low. And that's because also 14, 15, 20 years ago, they decided to bet big on solar and they decided to bet big on EVs,” explained Kothari.
A big winner for Tekne in China this year is JCET (JS A group), a Shanghai‑listed advanced packaging company whose stock has nearly tripled year-to-date. JCET handles advanced chip packaging — integrating chips with memory, power, and cooling. That work evolved from simple soldering into a complex, high‑value process.
Kothari explained that the company is part of the broader story of the U.S. offshoring “simple” tasks, which have since become sophisticated and strategically important.
In the 1980s and 1990s “America decided that soldering a chip onto a circuit board was not something America needed to do,” he said. “We're too rich and we can do more interesting things like write software and build internet companies.
Now, however, jobs like these have become “very complex, complicated, high value things that only finely tuned robots can do,” he said. This Chinese company has been doing it for 35 years and “now it's infinitely valuable.”
