The hedge funds that launched in 2024 - and that are still hiring

2024 was either the year that hedge funds got their mojo back or grew up, depending on who you ask. Some, however, didn’t have any mojo before 2024, and couldn’t grow up at all – because they didn’t exist.

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Market intelligence firm Preqin says that last year marked a record 24-year-low for new hedge fund debuts, with fundraising conditions notably difficult. And yet, despite the storm, there were a few births.

We’ve already written about the biggest two already – Jain Global and Taula Capital. But there's also the likes of Freestone Grove Partners, a fund with $3.5bn under management, based in San Francisco and founded by Todd Barker and Daniel Morillio, former Citadel partner and MD, respectively.

Bloomberg says the fund has described itself as “anti-pod”. That doesn’t mean it won’t have pods, just fewer, and better funded ones. It’ll also limit assets coming in, however.

Freestone has been adding names to its Citadel-studded line-up, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. It hired Vikrant Dhall to its quantitative research this team earlier this month courtesy of Capstone, where he had spent just a year and a half. It also added David Key last month as a director of primary strategies. Key was a senior analyst at Balyasny before leaving the fund. Both men are based in New York.

Another of last year's babies is Crosby Resource Capital. Founded by Robert Crosby, the New York-based commodities fund debuted with $2bn under management. Crosby himself was most recently Citadel’s head of agriculture before leaving and starting his eponymous firm. Crosby Resource Capital doesn’t have a website, but it added a handful of names to its New York office last year, including William Recktenwald as a natural gas trader from Houston-based Roscommon Analytics.

There's also Helix Partners, a distressed debt fund founded by Jonathan Heller, which has $1.5bn under management and is based in New York. Heller, formerly of Millennium Management, received $1bn from the fund to set up shop. It doesn't appear to have hired recently

The last unicorn hedge fund that launched in 2024 was Arrowpoint Investment Partners, a multi-strategy fund founded by Jonathan Xiong and Joo Lee. The fund is based in Singapore and is also backed by Millennium - for which Xiong was a PM.

Arrowpoint shows the biggest propensity to hire this year. Finimize reported that it leased another 8,000 square feet of office space in Hong Kong in September, and added staff including Nick Gao in the city. Gao is a former senior trader at Welwing Capital, and he joined Arrowpoint as a senior PM. In Singapore, Arrowpoint added senior PM John Chen in July, courtesy of Hudson Bay Capital Management.

There were a number of other hedge funds below $1bn that debuted in 2024, too – we’ve listed them below.

Despite the inherent risk of a hedge fund launch – Goldman Sachs estimated, some years ago, that half of hedge funds fail in the long run, and the majority of failures fail within the first three years – hedge funds are as popular as ever. Since their inception in 1969, they’ve made investors around $1.9tn since then, according to Reuters, while also charging $1.8tn in fees for themselves.

The other two big funds in the list, Jain and Taula, won't be as gung ho over hiring in 2025 as they were in 2024. Taula is happy with its 77-person team, while Jain hasn't quite hit the ground running - it failed to get (anywhere near) its $8-10bn starting capital target, and its first few months of returns were rather poor. Despite the similar starting capital, it also has more than three times as many employees as Taula.

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