This year, Institutional Investor is honoring 10 Rising Stars in the hedge fund industry. The talented professionals in this elite group are recognized for their outstanding contributions and diverse backgrounds. We’ve chosen people from the tiniest startup funds to those working at the largest, and most iconic, firms.
We focus on five of the rising stars here.
Two of them, Kate Baumann of Empyrean Capital Partners and Farid Guindo of Drill Capital Management, were born in Africa. Baumann has transformed Empyrean’s capital base, and Guindo focuses on investing in energy sector infrastructure that is so critical to the citizens of his homeland. Another, Altimeter Capital Management’s Clark Tang is a New York City native and technology investor who saw potential in Nvidia long before the rest of the crowd. Hussein Sacoor launched his own hedge fund in his birthplace of Lisbon, Portugal, before moving to New York to join Tekne Capital Management, which invests in the Global South. Another New Yorker, Coatue’s Malachi Price, started out in consulting and now works with Coatue’s private investments.
Watch for profiles on our other five stars, which will be released soon. Two come from some of the largest, most successful firms while the other three have launched their own, smaller funds. The Rising Stars will be honored at the Allocators’ Choice Awards on September 18 at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City. You can register here. Last week II named the 2025 finalists for Endowment/Foundation CIO of the Year, Health Care System CIO of the Year, Public Pension CIO of the Year, and the Award for Leadership and Vision.
Clark Tang, Altimeter Capital Management
Clark Tang was only three years old when he figured out the password and logged on to his dad’s computer. By age seven, he was using the internet all the time — and playing video games that gave him a taste for trading. That ultimately led him to the world of hedge funds, and eventually to Altimeter Capital, a leading technology-focused investment firm, where he made a breakout investment in Nvidia in late 2022.
Last year, he became the youngest person to be named partner at Altimeter, which focuses on both public and private investments and has $10 billion in assets under management. Tang, who turns 30 later this year, focuses on AI and oversees software and semiconductor investments.
Born to Chinese immigrants in New York City, where his dad was the editor of the largest Chinese newspaper in the U.S., Tang was a math and science geek who got into the prestigious Bronx School of Science. A self-described “curious” child, he originally figured he would be an engineer. But early video game trading experiences gave him a taste for economics, and he decided to focus on business instead. “I felt like I already understood all of the concepts just innately,” he recalls.
A year studying in Shanghai while a sophomore at New York University’s Stern School of Business was formative. “What really struck me was there was this narrative that Chinese companies were just knockoff versions of American companies, especially within tech,” Tang says. But he found out that “a lot of the products and a lot of the innovations that they were making in China were actually more advanced than [those] in the U.S.”
That year — 2014 — was also when Alibaba went public, and the combination of private and public investments intrigued Tang. “That’s what I figured my north star was going to be. I was going to do global tech crossover investing, and that’s where I ended up today,” he says.
After college, Tang moved from New York to San Francisco to work for Goldman Sachs and immerse himself in Silicon Valley culture. In 2018, the successful IPO of Uber shifted the action to unicorns, and billions of dollars flowed into venture capital and growth investing as a result. So the next year, Tang was off to private equity firm Valor Equity Partners, then joined Altimeter in 2021.
“My ethos since I was a kid was to try to understand how the world works,” he says. “If you have truly a different point of view . . . that’s where you make the real money.”
At Altimeter, that contrarian perspective turned into Tang’s big bet that “AI was going to be huge” and his early call on Nvidia. He pitched it in September 2022, and Altimeter bought the stock in October — shortly before it took off. (It has gained more than 900 percent since the beginning of 2023.)
Tang got the idea from a conversation he heard from an early investor in OpenAI. He remembers him chatting about a “new thing” called GPT-3, saying, “Sometimes it can just write emails for me. Half the time it’s like junk, but this thing feels kind of magical.”
At the time, Tang says, he didn’t know much about AI. “But that was always sticking there in my mind. And I just started going really deep into AI” and quickly realized that demand for Nvidia’s chips was going to explode.
Kate Fisher Baumann, Empyrean Capital Partners
Kate Baumann has been holding investors’ hands since she first went to Wall Street. The Georgetown University graduate joined J.P. Morgan’s private bank in 2007, just as the financial crisis was unfolding. Three years later, she went to Eton Park Capital. Then in 2017 founder Eric Mindich decided to shut it down — while it still had $7 billion in assets.
And now, at a time when the world of finance has been unsettled by the policies of President Donald Trump, Baumann is again assuaging investors’ concerns as a partner at Empyrean Capital, a $3 billion event-driven multistrategy hedge fundwhere she is a partner and head of business development and investor relations.
“You don’t know where the next bolt of lightning is,” she says. “The people in this industry that are successful have the ability to stay unemotional in such time periods and are able to capitalize on it.”
Today “there is a lot of handholding” with investors, she adds, but “it’s not so much ‘What’s this? What’s that?’ It’s more like getting inside people’s heads and understanding how are they feeling.”
At Empyrean, Baumann has successfully shifted the investor base from funds of funds, which are often the first to redeem in times of crisis. In her eight years there, she has I transformed the investor by region and type, making it almost entirely institutional.
“You want to diversify your capital base and risk-manage just like you would your portfolio. Everyone says they’re long-term investors; I can assure you they’re not,” she says.
Raising money for hedge funds from institutions has been notoriously difficult in recent years, as many have abandoned the asset class for private equity. But that reliance on private equity is now causing turmoil. Universities under attack by the Trump administration — notably Harvard and Yale —are trying to unload some of their private equity stakes to raise the cash they need as they are being threatened with the loss of the federal money they have long relied on.
“I would not want to have all my investor base right now in endowments or foundations, because that could change very quickly,” she says.
Weathering crises seems to come naturally to Baumann, an American citizen who was born in South Africa and lived on four different continents by the age of eight because of her father’s job as a Union Carbide/Energizer executive. “I know what it’s like to have your world turned upside down,” she notes.
Living abroad gave Baumann the ability to relate to “a lot of different people and personalities,” she says. Her extrovert nature also led her to co-found a group called Women of Georgetown, and she goes out of her way to praise several women she’s worked with during her career, including Mary Erdoes, CEO of the asset and wealth management division of J.P. Morgan, and Marcy Engel, former COO of Eton Park.
Reflecting on her experiences during the financial crisis and Eton Park’s shutdown, Baumann says, “You learn more in the tough times than you do if it’s so easy. I miss those days where everyone was just raising money. You know what? I wouldn’t trade it for the world because I think I learned more.”
Hussein Sacoor, Tekne Capital Management
The joke in the New York office of Tekne Capital is that Hussein Sacoor lives on a plane. “I don’t know if I take that in a good way or a bad way,” says Sacoor.
“I am in China five or six times per year,” he says over Zoom while visiting his family in Portugal, where he was born and raised. “I am heading to London in 48 hours. Then afterward, I’m going to South Korea, then China, then Hong Kong, then India, the Middle East, and then back.” In the next six months, he expects to visit 50 companies and meet with the top tech CEOs in the emerging markets.
If Tekne has an underlying theme, he says, it’s that the global South is the future. “The growth rates for the rest of the world will be superior to [those in the] U.S.,” he says. “The return equation is only now getting started.”
That theme is likely to pay off if Trump’s tariffs hurt the U.S. more than other countries. “The benefit that we’re getting from this tariff policy pivot is that value is starting to be recognized outside the U.S.,” Sacoor notes.
Take China. “The tariffs’ impact to China are overstated,” he explains, saying that Chinese exports to the U.S. account for less than 3 percent of GDP.
Tekne is also largely insulated from the tariff wars. It owns a handful of Chinese companies, all of which serve the local market. Tekne has invested in ten to 12 tech companies in a universe of $10 trillion, and those companies are “close to 100 percent inward-looking, solving problems for and serving their home market,” explains Sacoor.
Sacoor joined Tekne in 2022 after shutting down a hedge fund he had started with a college friend. After graduating in Portugal with a double-degree master’s in management, he had moved to Sao Paulo in 2015 to work for BTG Pactual. The friend had joined Blackstone. In 2016, Sacoor went back to Portugal, and the two young men started a tech-oriented fund in Lisbon with $455,000.
They grew the fund to tens of millions of dollars before closing shop, and Sacoor, who says he had a “deep desire to compete in the U.S. arena,” joined Tekne in New York.
New York is a long way from Lisbon, which Sacoor allows “is not exactly a talent hub for the investment management business.” His parents, immigrants from Mozambique (once a Portuguese colony), were pharmacists and expected him to join the family business. That business is predictable and structurally oligopolistic in Portugal, but it’s also highly regulated, Sacoor says. “It’s a very low-ceiling business.”
That’s certainly not the case with hedge funds.
The $1.2 billion Tekne, launched in 2012, is headed by Beeneet Kothari, a former portfolio manager with Stan Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital who began investing in China 20 years ago. Last year, Tekne tripled its investments in China and the fund gained 22 percent. This year, China’s markets have continued to rise — gaining 18 percent in the first quarter as the U.S. fell 5 percent.
Malachi Price, Coatue Management
When Malachi Price joined Coatue as a general partner in February 2022, the tech world that he and the firm had focused on for years was hitting a period of uncertainty that has yet to subside.
Price has no regrets. “It was definitely a turbulent time, but I can’t think of a better sort of educational environment to come up in.”
Then 28, Price came to Coatue from private equity firm New Mountain Capital after a stretch as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He had never been involved with the hedge fund side of finance. It was eye-opening.
“You get to see the immediate reactions to macro conditions,” says Price, who explains that the private and public sides of Coatue work closely together. (The firm offers both private equity and hedge funds.) “And you see the way that the team there deals with it, how risk management kicks in, what trends survive a bad macro, and what really gets punished. That was really informative to me.”
Price’s role is with Coatue Tactical Solutions, which involves what its name implies. “I focus on the strategy within our privates business that provides . . . essentially any type of security that gives us some level of downside protection while still maintaining equity convexity in the companies that we invest in.”
Coatue, which has $55 billion in assets under management, has successfully deployed $3 billion in structured equity and capital solutions over the past two years. Price has originated and overseen many of these deals.
“You’re basically serving as a thought partner and a capital-solutions partner to a company,” he says. The equity market is volatile, and “debt markets can come and go in terms of the availability of capital and also its costs.” So Coatue goes to clients and tries to design something that meets their needs “and gives us the type of investment that we would like,” he explains.
The son of an investment banker, Price grew up in Manhattan and attended private schools Buckley and Phillips Academy–Andover before going to Dartmouth College. Despite his family background, he says, his father did not push him to study finance. At Dartmouth, he majored in Russian studies and economics.
In fact, Price says, his father advised him not to go into investment banking. “He’d done it for his entire career, and he wanted me to see more of the world and decide for myself,” he recalls.
After college Price joined Boston Consulting Group, which he says gave him the opportunity to do due diligence with firms like the Blackstone Group, Carlyle, and KKR. But he wanted to get closer to the financial underwriting aspect of private equity and in 2019 joined New Mountain, where he focused on the tech aspects of health care and finance.
“Technology is really just whatever is winning within a vertical,” Price says.
Farid Guindo, Drill Capital Management
In some ways, African civil wars prepared Drill Capital founder Farid Guindo for the turbulent world of finance — and gave him the motivation for his career in energy markets.
As the son of a U.N. peacekeeping mission employee, Guindo spent his childhood in six different African countries. He was born in 1987 in the Central African Republic, the country where the U.N. first assigned his father, a native of Mali who had studied in Paris. From there, the family moved to Chad, Mali, Namibia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Madagascar as civil wars erupted in Africa following emergence from colonial control.
Forced evacuations occurred at a moment’s notice, when a given country was about to explode. “I was always under high pressure, anxiety,” Guindo recalls.
The family’s next U.N. assignment was in Haiti. When the Guindos were evacuated from that hot spot, Guindo attended a prep school in Florida before heading to McGill University in Montreal. He now splits his time between Canada, where his family has settled, and New York, where Drill is based.
At McGill, Guindo studied economics and finance. After graduating in 2008, he took a job in Lehman Brothers’ energy investment banking unit, based in Calgary, which was soon taken over by Barclays when Lehman filed for bankruptcy. His energy focus soon took him to several hedge funds. In 2011, Guindo went to work for Dwight Anderson’s Ospraie Management Capital Management, followed by roles at TVR Capital (a Point72 spinout now part of the SourceRock Group); and Texas-based Brenham Capital Management. In 2019, he and Dan Dreyfus, a friend from McGill who was at Goldman Sachs, teamed up to start Bornite Capital Management, a global long-short equity fund that has gained about 100 percent, net of fees, over five years.
“I got to see the building of a business and the success of that business. I got to see basically conversations with some of the world’s biggest institutions and pensions at the very, very early stage,” he says.
Last year, Guindo told Dreyfus he was ready to start his own fund, and his partner agreed to back him. Drill Capital officially launched in January with less than $2 million.
The energy markets aren’t for everyone, especially these days, Guindo acknowledges. “This is one of the hardest markets that I’ve seen. And that was one of the reasons I was so excited about launching Drill Capital. I knew that I was going to have literally next to no competition.”
He expects there will be an abundance of energy in the near future, especially if sanctions against Russian oil and gas end, leading to lower prices for those fuels than are currently forecast.
So what does Drill do? “In a world where you have abundant energy and where oil and gas prices are both low, who wins?” Guindo asks. Drill is betting on infrastructure. “Think of the veins and arteries, the bridges and tunnels that help you move those molecules around. These are incredibly, incredibly difficult to replicate.”
Guindo is an unabashed supporter of the industry at a time when many demonize it for its role in climate change. “I know what it is to not have electricity,” he says. “I know what it is for these kids to go in schools where they can’t even turn on the lights. We need to exploit this basic resource because it changes everybody’s lives.”
