By Carolina Mandl
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Tech-focused hedge fund Whale Rock Capital Management is planning to reopen its flagship fund early next year for between $200 million and $300 million in new money after a strong performance in 2024, a source familiar with the matter said.
The fund, which has roughly $9 billion in assets, seeks to attract fresh capital as it sees opportunities to invest in smaller semiconductor and supply chain companies with exposure to artificial intelligence, the source said.
It has been closed to new investments since 2021.
Whale Rock’s flagship fund is up 51% this year through November, compared to a nearly 28% gain for the S&P 500.
The fund posted a 32% gain in 2023. With that, the fund has largely recovered from back-to-back losses in 2021 and 2022, when it fell 9% and by more than 40%, respectively.
The firm, which has placed early bets on how impactful artificial intelligence could be on technology, was founded in 2006 by Alexander Sacerdote, a veteran investor in semiconductor and hardware firms and a former tech portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments.
Whale Rock’s winners this year include long positions in some of the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks, such as Nvidia and Amazon, as well as electronic equipment company Celestica, mobile gaming ad platform AppLovin, education tech company Duolingo and AI-server maker Super Micro Computer.
In November, the hedge fund was up 8.3%, while its long-only fund gained 10.6% last month and is up 52% on the year.
Several multibillion-dollar hedge funds gained in November, riding the volatility of the U.S. presidential election despite tight polling that made positioning more challenging for portfolio managers, Reuters reported earlier.
(Reporting by Carolina Mandl in New York; editing by Ira Iosebashvili and Jason Neely)
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