Inside onetime Viking star Divya Nettimi's $1.9 billion hedge fund

Business Insider

3 days ago

Divya Nettimi is focused on the long term.
The former Viking Global star portfolio manager and founder of $1.9 billion Avala Global, Nettimi told Business Insider in an interview that "when I first look at companies, I ask myself where they'll be in 100 years."
While there might be some market hiccups and sell-offs in the short term, the 39-year-old said her young firm, which began trading in October 2022, looks past volatility that's not connected to company fundamentals.
"It's really important to stick to the core process," said Nettimi, whose résumé of elite colleges and big-name financial firms made her launch one of the hottest in recent years.
In the short term, Nettimi's firm, lauded to be the first $1 billion hedge fund launched by a woman, has dealt with its own volatility. It's faced significant turnover of its day-one team and, more recently, suffered its worst month on record in March with a drop of more than 14% in the turbulent, tariff-panicked markets.
A majority of the starting team has left the firm, including the entire four-person investing team supporting Nettimi, the sole portfolio manager. Three former employees say they left because of a tense workplace culture that came from the top of the firm. Avala declined to comment on former employees, but Nettimi expressed confidence in how she's managing her current team and her book.
The investment staff is larger now, with nine members, not including Nettimi, than it was at launch. She says the team is more experienced in public markets; for example, Jordan Straff spent more than a decade at Roberto Mignone's Bridger Capital before joining Avala last year.
The firm has erased its first-quarter loss, a person close to the New York-based manager said, and is up 6% on the year after a 10% gain in May.
Nettimi said she believes Avala is exactly where it should be as the firm nears its third anniversary, a pivotal milestone for institutional investors that require a track record of at least that length to invest.
"This is part of the natural evolution of the firm," she said.
Talent turnover
From Nettimi's point of view, the current team's size and experience level outweigh the downside of losing six members of her original nine-person team, which included her CFO and marketing head.
"I have found that when a firm has demonstrated success, the talent pool opens up significantly," which allows the manager to hire more experienced investors, she said. Avala generated returns of 23% and 21% in 2023 and 2024, its first two trading years, the person close to the firm said — besting the average fund and Nettimi's former firm, long-running Tiger Cub Viking Global, over the same time period.
When asked if her hiring process has changed, Nettimi said that six months after launch, "we really beefed up our recruiting process in a way that incorporated a lot more testing for culture."
Young firms are inherently less institutional and bureaucratic, and role responsibilities can be more fluid. Nettimi said that she set up the manager's payroll system and bought the company's domain name for its website herself. She said she seeks out people who are "actually excited to help out a little bit with marketing or a little bit with something else."
She was held to high standards when working at Viking and Goldman Sachs, she added, and "my bar is just as high as theirs."
An investor in the firm who asked not to be named said the turnover was typical of a startup fund, and the employee departures didn't bother them. Several recruiters and prime brokers told BI it was an unusual amount of movement for a big-name launch that has had decent performance.
"If there is high turnover, it significantly reduces the marketability of the fund," said Don Steinbrugge, the founder of industry consultancy Agecroft Partners.
Talking generally about the industry and not about Avala specifically, he added, "investors believe that if there is turnover of the investment team, it is going to impact the hedge fund's ability to effectively implement their investment strategy."
Former employees, almost all of whom had previously worked on the buyside, were critical of her management style. Three people said that she would give them the silent treatment and ignore them for days at a time when she was frustrated, straining internal communications. Avala declined to comment on past employees' experiences.
Early this year, Abhinav Das, an investing team member who was not at the firm at launch, also left the firm. Das did not respond to requests for comment.
Avala is not the first time Nettimi has led a team, and former Viking colleagues had positive views of her. One who has left the Tiger Cub said they hoped to work with her again one day. Another, Joe McLaughlin, is a current member of the Avala investing staff.
As the firm has grown — there are now 16 staffers, not including Nettimi — the hiring process has gotten more robust.
"The first person I hired, I was the only person interviewing them. The second person, two people interviewed them," she said.
"You get a lot more data points on someone," she said, and that the extra input has helped Avala "ascertain who were great fits" for the firm. One recent addition to her team is Rebecca Chia, a onetime fundraiser for Atalaya and Third Point, who is the head of capital partnerships for the firm.
'We don't chase'
Weeks after Avala's worst quarter on record, Nettimi was far from morose. The Virginia native told BI that "this is one of the best environments we've seen in years" for concentrated stockpickers.
The extended Tiger family, which all have ties to late billionaire investor and Tiger Management founder Julian Robertson, is known for deep research and big bets, and Avala is no exception. The long side of the firm's portfolio at the end of the first quarter had 23 names in it, regulatory filings show, with a position in Amazon as Avala's biggest holding.
Nettimi explained her investing process as incorporating a "10-year vision" on the world — artificial intelligence and cybersecurity are two themes she's excited about — with real-time data to track market moves across industries and tickers.
"We are able to assess when sentiment diverges from fundamentals and then take advantage of market dislocations," she said.
"We are bottom-up stockpickers, and if you can move decisively and lean into secular change, key inflection points, it's just a very rich environment," she said.
It's why the market volatility from President Donald Trump's tariff policies — and the significant March drawdown that resulted because of it — isn't a cause for panic for Nettimi.
She said her team can tell quickly between a fundamental shift or noise, which helps them lean in when the market gets it wrong.
"Valuation discipline is core to our process. We don't chase, we wait for the moment when risk-reward is asymmetric. And when that comes, we move with size."
An industry rarity
Much of the early coverage of Avala and Nettimi focused not only on her Viking background and Harvard Business School education but also on her gender. In an industry where data tracker Preqin says just 11% of senior staff are women, and fewer are founders, the new funds from Nettimi and former Lone Pine executive Mala Gaonkar were significant launches in late 2022 and early 2023, respectively.
Nettimi was an even bigger rarity in hedge funds since she started her firm and fundraised for Avala while pregnant with her second child. She recently gave birth to her third kid, and she told BI that she hopes to show younger women in the industry that it's possible to do both.
"When I mentor people, there is one thing that always comes up: Can I have a family, and can I do this? And I really want them to hear that they can," she said.
Her investment team at Avala includes three women, and she has spoken at Goldman Sachs alumni events about being a woman in the field. Slowly, she said, she's seeing more women enter the industry, "although it's still uncommon."
"Every time I see a female leader, I root for them to succeed, because I would love to see more women in the field and I really would love to help create a path for the next generation of female leaders," she said.
She said she's found that being a mom has helped her investing abilities and vice versa.
"Both sides enrich each other; the fulfillment I get from being a founder and an investor makes me a better parent," she said.
It's important for her kids to see her excited and engaged from her work, she said, and she's optimized her life so that their school and home, and her office are all in proximity to each other in Manhattan. Though she said her firm hires on merit alone, she's hoping ambitious women in the industry can, by seeing people like her, draw inspiration and see they don't have to choose between being a parent and an investor.
"I would love to see a world where women don't worry about these fears anymore because they see so many professional women successfully navigating both," she said.