The hedge fund industry’s future is already taking shape.
Institutional Investor’s 2026 Hedge Fund Rising Stars are helping drive some of the most important trends in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantitative investing. This year’s honorees include investors finding unexpected ways to capitalize on the AI boom, applying scientific expertise to the search for new drug therapies, developing new approaches to credit markets, and building machine-first investment strategies. Their paths into hedge funds are varied, but each is already helping shape where the industry is headed.
The Hedge Fund Rising Stars will be recognized on September 17, 2026, at a gala at the Mandarin Oriental in New York City. You can register here.
Read about II's 2026 Allocator Lifetime Achievement award winner and the 2026 Allocator Rising Stars.
Max Cook, Coatue Management
When Max Cook joined Coatue Management as an analyst in 2022, he decided to focus on a niche no one else was exploring at the tech-oriented hedge fund: industrials. It was an area Cook knew well, having spent the previous 18 months at Advent International, where he learned the finance of buyouts as part of the industrials team.
Cook’s plan at Coatue was to look for companies that would be good shorts by identifying cyclical industrial “overearners,” post-Covid, using indicators like bottlenecks and the extended lead time needed to deliver products.
But when the hedge fund became fascinated with the budding AI movement and was looking for novel ways to explore it, Cook pivoted. He says he realized that if Coatue’s GPU forecasts were right, AI would drive a massive data center build-out, which in turn would require significant industrial equipment — often made by the same companies he had been analyzing as potential shorts. Cook turned GPU forecasts into data center megawatts and then into dollars per megawatt of switchgear, transformers, grid equipment, and what it means for gas turbines, mapping the entire chain of bottlenecks.
His focus was to find “sleepy” industrials where a significant portion of revenue — about 20 percent — comes from data centers, then apply Coatue’s aggressive data center growth forecasts to show that these companies’ overall growth could accelerate dramatically, often beyond what other analysts expected.
Cook recalls identifying companies likely to benefit: Eaton, Schneider, GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, and Vertiv. Several of those companies, which others later realized would thrive during a data center boom, became some of Coatue’s biggest winners in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
Growing up in the suburbs of Boston as the son of two lawyers, Cook had no intention of going into finance. He says he didn’t have the “slightest” knowledge of the field. “I did not know what consulting was. I did not know what investment banking was when I got to college.” But his major in history and global affairs at Yale trained him to think about big ideas and trends and to sift quickly through large amounts of information to find key questions — skills he sees as similar to those needed in hedge fund investing.
His academic focus was mainly post–World War II U.S. history, especially foreign policy and strategic decision making, connecting an interest in big strategic ideas to his current work at Coatue, which he describes as identifying transformational technologies like AI and then rapidly narrowing them down to investable opportunities.
After graduating from Yale, Cook joined Bain & Co., where consulting was “liberal arts education in business.” After about three years, he moved on to Advent. By that time, he says, he wanted a faster feedback loop and something “a little sexier” than traditional industrial company carve-outs, so he explored public markets roles and landed at Coatue in 2022.
His success at targeting industrials as an AI play got Cook promoted to sector head in 2024, the most senior position on the investing side, under portfolio manager Philippe Laffont. (Sector heads don’t run separate capital pools but are ultimately responsible for all names in a sector, working with two or three analysts.) Initially, Cook was responsible for industrials and the energy sector. He now oversees coverage of AI labs and hyperscalers like Microsoft and Amazon, as well as software. And although Cook works on the fund’s public investments, he also spends about 20 percent of his time looking at AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are planning to go public, as Coatue’s VC arm is already invested in those names. As both a public and a private investor, he says Coatue “can go where the excitement is.”
Agustin Mohedas, Janus Henderson Investors
It’s not every day that a hedge fund investor finds out that a drug similar to one he helped develop as part of his PhD thesis is close to being approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But that’s what happened to Agustin Mohedas, a biotech portfolio manager and research analyst at Janus Henderson.
While studying for his PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, Mohedas worked with a Harvard lab developing a drug to block a genetic mutation that causes a rare disease in which soft tissue turns to bones, known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva. Now a similar drug has been licensed by Mirum Pharmaceuticals. And the Janus Biotech Innovation fund, where Mohedas is a portfolio manager, is invested in that company.
“It is very gratifying to see some of the things that I worked on eventually becoming real-life therapies that can help patients,” he says. “It’s not our drug, it’s not the one we exactly made, but it’s one that works in the exact way we published on all those years ago.”
Mohedas, who moved to the U.S. from Argentina when he was six years old, says he got interested in biology while in high school in New Jersey, where the family had relocated because of his father’s academic career. (Although Mohedas is Argentinian, he was born in Belgium, where his father was engaged in chemical industry research at the University of Ghent.)
At the same time, the teenager became intrigued by investing. After winning $1,000 in a raffle, he decided to invest the money— but was unhappy with the returns. That led him to start studying finance and investing on his own.
Mohedas got a scholarship to Texas A&M University, where he studied biomedical engineering, and his own investing started moving in the direction of biotech. “It was always more of a hobby and something I did on the side, not professionally, but it was something I was very passionate about,” he says.
Later, while working on his PhD, he was able to take classes for free at the MIT Sloan School of Management, which is how he happened upon a lecture by Peter Kolchinsky, the managing director of RA Capital, who spoke about investing in publicly traded biotech companies. Mohedas was fascinated because at the time he knew only about the venture investing side of biotech.
After the lecture, Mohedas told Kolchinsky that he was looking for a job once he finished his thesis, and Kolchinsky encouraged him to apply at RA Capital. Mohedas was quickly hired for RA Capital’s scientific research division, which maps out therapeutic landscapes.
He stayed at RA Capital, a prominent biotech hedge fund, for almost three years, eventually moving into an investment analyst role, where he looked at both public and private companies in the type of crossover investing that RA was doing. Mohedas was then offered a position at a smaller firm called Eventide Asset Management that allowed him to help manage a fund. As that fund grew into a top performer, Mohedas came to the attention of Janus, which was launching a pure-play biotech fund and needed a manager to help run it.
The Biotech Innovation Fund, launched in 2020, has roughly $5 billion in assets, investing both long and short in public companies and taking stakes in private companies.
Mohedas says that one of the most exciting scientific breakthroughs Janus is looking at right now involves companies developing in vivo CAR-T therapy cancer drugs to target multiple myeloma at a fraction of the cost of current medications.
Last year was a phenomenal one for biotech investing, and the Janus fund gained 55 percent. But Mohedas acknowledges that biotech investing is volatile, noting: “Early-stage biotech valuations are highly sensitive to sentiment because revenues and profits are often ten to 15 years away, making present values dependent on assumptions about future market size and success.”
Greg Obenshain, Verdad Advisers
While running high-yield debt portfolios at Apollo Group years ago, Greg Obenshain saw a colleague coding in Python and had an epiphany. “I was doing all this stuff in Excel, and I realized how much was possible,” he says. So Obenshain taught himself to code — and has since become a convert to quant investing.
“Having been a fundamental analyst for years, I decided I could have one to two great insights a year,” he explains. But investing in 60 companies? “There was no way I could do them that well. I had no edge.”
In 2016, after four years at Apollo, Obenshain left and spent two years building a quantitative credit strategy and a bond database. “At the time, there was no source of truth where you could link bond data to stock data and earnings data. So I had to build my own and make all those connections myself,” he says.
As he was planning to launch his own bond product, he met Dan Rasmussen, who had recently started a hedge fund, Verdad, focused on small-cap equities. The two hit it off. A few months later, Obenshain called Rasmussen and told him he wanted to try to launch this product with him at Verdad. “Would you say yes?” he asked. “I’d say yes” was Rasmussen’s response.
That was in 2019. Now, says Obenshain, who is a partner and head of credit at Verdad, “I spend most of my time improving the models. There is a moment in your quant career when you have to give it over to the model and trust that you can make a lot more progress fixing problems in the model than fixing names.”
The son of a commercial banker who grew up in Belgium and London before moving back to his hometown of Chicago for the last two years of high school, Obenshain wasn’t sure finance was for him. He studied history and economics at Dartmouth, then attended the Kellogg School of Management, where he received an MBA.
After business school, Obenshain wanted to work on renewable energy and spent a summer in GE’s wind subsidiary business as his classmates went to Wall Street. Obenshain eventually became an energy analyst and in 2006 joined Stone Tower Capital, a CLO manager in New York, which was later bought by Apollo. At Apollo, he worked with Marc Rowan, now the CEO.
Asked about the current credit cycle, Obenshain says, “We have been at the end of a credit cycle for a long time and may remain there for a long time.” As Institutional Investor has previously reported, Verdad expects the pain in this cycle to come from private credit, as it is the part of the market that has grown the most and been the most aggressive.
Obenshain argues that some private credit funds won’t be able to “save themselves” because their companies don’t have many options. The funds “will have to just post years of bad returns,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a blowout, but it’s just the years of mediocre returns.” The beneficiaries will be those that can raise distressed funds and “use it as a terrific opportunity . . . to go buy a lot of the distressed private credit.”
Kevin Salimian, Voxel Capital Partners
When Eric Mindich decided to close his Eton Park hedge fund in 2017, Kevin Salimian had been leading the firm’s U.S. TMT investing for almost three years. With several years of hedge fund experience under his belt — including two at Viking Global — he thought about starting his own hedge fund. He even had a name for it: Voxel Capital. (A voxel is a 3-D pixel.)
Salimian bought the voxelcap.com domain at the time, but was soon offered a job at Lone Pine Capital and put the idea on hold. The urge to run his own fund didn’t go away, however, and in 2022 he wrote up a business plan — though he stayed on at Lone Pine until this year.
Now his dream is being realized. Salimian is launching Voxel, a tech-focused hedge fund. He began trading his own capital in March and plans an official launch with outside capital in the third quarter. In May, he was a speaker at the Sohn Investment Conference, pitching an investment in Infineon Technologies.
“If you’re very deep on the technology and you’re very deep in what is happening, not just with AI, but with technology broadly, I don’t think there’s ever been a more attractive time to invest,” Salimian asserts.
There’s little question that he is deep in technology. Salimian was born to Iranian students in Palo Alto, where his dad was getting a PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Both parents had come to the U.S. in 1978 to study and decided to stay.
“So my career is tech, but my life is tech,” he says. “All my mentors and family friends growing up were engineers like my dad, mostly in semiconductors and hardware, software, artificial intelligence, and the early internet.”
The young Salimian took a bit of a detour from the engineering career path, having become interested in the stock market at an early age. He ended up studying math and economics at Northwestern University, all the while hoping to become a tech investor. After a two-year post-university analyst program at Morgan Stanley, he joined TPG Capital’s technology and telecom group. It was August 2008 — just before the stock market crash.
“It ended up being the best experience I could have asked for as a young person,” Salimian recalls. “There was so much learning being around these exceptional investors. I saw a lot of value destruction very quickly.”
After TPG, he went to Harvard Business School, then got a job at Viking, where he was finally able to do public investing. That, he says, was “nirvana.” Salimian spent two years at Viking, then was recruited away by Eton Park to take on a more expansive role across the TMT landscape. When the hedge fund closed, he was almost immediately offered a job at Lone Pine, where he stayed for nine years.
Salimian joined in 2017 as a managing director focused on technology and became a partner after only 18 months. He opened a Palo Alto office soon after. Beginning in 2022, he led an aggressive shift of the portfolio into AI, and the next year formally took over leadership of global technology.
“I never thought I would stay nine years, but it was a great opportunity, with progressively more responsibility over time,” Salimian says. But the desire to start his own firm remained. He left Lone Pine in February, with the blessing of founder Steve Mandel. (Voxel has the formal support of Lone Pine. Several of Salimian’s career mentors are also investing in the fund.)
Unlike most hedge funds, Voxel is a long-only fund. Although it has the ability to hedge, it is targeting 100 percent net exposure and will have a concentrated portfolio of 12 to 15 stocks focused on mispriced opportunities driven by durable technology- and AI-driven change.
Salimian explains why: With the rise of highly leveraged multimanagers and quants, any shift in market sentiment means that “ongoing market unwinds happen all the time,” he says. “By having a structure where you don’t have a bunch of leverage, you can play offense in those periods.”
Oliver Simon, Bridgewater Associates
Oliver Simon did not seem destined for the world of finance — especially a cutting-edge role in AI at one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He grew up on New York City’s Upper West Side in a family ensconced in the arts. Both of his parents are documentary filmmakers, and his grandfather was a theater press agent.
Simon became interested in finance at a young age. So while in high school at the Dalton School, he wrangled an internship at distressed-debt firm MatlinPatterson — during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. “From there, I guess you could say I was hooked,” he recalls. After studying applied math and economics at Johns Hopkins University, Simon joined Morgan Stanley on the interest rate options and exotics trading floor for two years.
Then, in 2016, he joined Bridgewater on the macro equities team and later moved into equity trading strategies. Around 2020, he began partnering with co‑CIO Greg Jensen on single‑name equity strategies.
“As is evident to anyone who spends time with him, Oliver is exceptionally bright,” says Jensen. “But what stood out to me even more in first working together was his instinct to move toward the frontier — consistently gravitating toward Bridgewater’s hardest, most important problems.”
Within a couple of years, Jensen decided that AI and machine learning had matured enough for Bridgewater to attempt a “machine first” approach to investing, and Simon joined him in building what became known as AIA Labs.
“It was no surprise to me that Oliver was hungry to build AIA, but what it required was a rare combination of skills: deep fluency across science, investment, and technology coupled with the ability to understand a vision, translate it into a business, and galvanize a brand-new, world-class team around an idea that did not yet exist,” Jensen says.
AIA Labs started in early 2023 as a team of four or five people. Now the AIA Labs macro trading strategy, which Simon heads, is an external, machine-first fund within Bridgewater, distinct from Pure Alpha and All Weather, with machines making investment decisions with human oversight.
The goal is not to replicate Bridgewater’s existing human-derived insights but to build a differentiated learning process that discovers new relationships in markets, says Simon. After trading for two and a half years, the strategy has performed meaningfully differently from Bridgewater’s flagship Pure Alpha, and “well within expectations,” he says.
“I do think that for Bridgewater, AI is going to transform everything we do. And I think that will be true of many players in our industry and probably the world as a whole,” Simon explains. The firm’s traditional funds, like Pure Alpha, are already using AI tools that make [them] more productive and enable insights that were previously unattainable.
AI has even helped Simon outside of work. He has a long‑standing interest in competitive games, especially poker. He plays regularly, attends the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, and uses AI‑based “solvers” to analyze optimal play, asserting that these study tools have fundamentally changed poker strategy.
Mackenzie Snyder, Surveyor Capital, Citadel
Mackenzie Snyder didn’t know what a hedge fund was when she joined J.P. Morgan’s prime brokerage sales team as an intern while still in college. Since then, however, she has had a meteoric rise in the hedge fund world, going from J.P Morgan to Boothbay Fund Management to Citadel in less than six years.
In March, at the age of 29, she was named head of business development at Citadel’s Surveyor Capital, one of the hedge fund’s most prominent teams. She is the youngest person in the firm’s history to step into that role.
Snyder is an exceptionally driven person, according to those who’ve worked with her. She also has a background that may be unique in the hedge fund business: Until the age of 14, she and her twin sister were homeschooled by their mother, a homemaker with a liberal arts background. (Her father is a software engineer.) Then, as Snyder approached high school age, she decided to go her own way and went to a public high school in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where the family lived.
“I wanted to test myself. I wanted to build more relationships. I wanted to see how I could perform among more peers,” she says. Snyder ended up graduating second in her class and applied early decision to Williams College, which she chose because of its small, tight-knit community and curriculum across math, hard sciences, language arts, and social sciences. Although at first undecided on a career path, she eventually settled on an economics major.
“I always had a love of problem solving,” she says.
After graduating from Williams, Snyder joined J.P. Morgan full-time. One of her first clients was Boothbay, which focuses on sourcing niche, small, emerging hedge fund strategies to build a multimanager platform. She soon joined the firm and helped it grow. After only 18 months, however, she was ready for her next move and joined Citadel’s Surveyor, one of the most prominent of Citadel’s five fundamental equities businesses. It comprises more than 20 investment teams and 100-plus investment professionals.
Snyder explains that she is motivated by the pursuit of excellence and the competitive drive in the hedge fund world. “Hedge funds are intense competitors — not just for returns on their portfolios, but also for investor capital and for top talent. It creates an environment that requires swift, strategic decision-making and a relentless drive to maintain your edge,” she says. “And good judgment.”
About Citadel she says: “I was drawn here because of its culture of meritocracy. If you have great ideas and do great work, you can come to Citadel and be in a position to have a tremendous impact quickly.”
She led one of the fastest investment team builds in Surveyor’s 18-year history, according to the firm. And though her role focuses on recruitment of investment talent, especially portfolio managers, Snyder has also hired half of the business’s trading team, demonstrating what Citadel calls “a stakeholder mentality and commercial drive” to go beyond the defined scope of her job.
