By the point Monetary Information reported on the agency’s 2013 outcomes, that early guess had compounded into one of many extra sturdy different asset managers to return out of London’s post-2000 wave of unbiased fund launches.
The founding construction was uncommon for its second. Gabay, who had spent the earlier decade in fairness gross sales and funding banking at Merrill Lynch and Credit score Suisse First Boston, constructed Duet with co-founder Alain Schibl round a strategy-agnostic premise: again people with a demonstrated edge, then let the mandate comply with the supervisor somewhat than forcing each rent into a set home technique. “We’re constructing out funds primarily based on people somewhat than the technique itself,” Gabay instructed Euromoney because the agency expanded, an outline that has held up as an correct abstract of how Duet grew for the subsequent 20 years.
2002–2003: A Completely different Type of Begin
Most new hedge fund platforms within the early 2000s launched with a single flagship technique and scaled that one concept. Duet did the alternative. Ranging from that preliminary $10 million fund, the agency added methods one supervisor at a time, ultimately constructing out fairness special-situations funds, a world macro fund, a CTA fund and a long-only African tracker fund investing throughout ten international locations. The agency later introduced in Osman Semerci, Merrill Lynch’s former world head of mounted earnings, currencies and commodities, as chief government, a rent that signaled the platform’s ambitions had outgrown its founding fund.
By 2013, that manager-by-manager method had scaled right into a agency managing greater than $5 billion, in keeping with Monetary Information’s protection of the 12 months’s outcomes. Duet had, by then, develop into the controlling shareholder of a number of asset managers spanning the hedge fund and long-only house, non-public fairness and actual property, and wealth administration, working by way of 4 subsidiaries regulated by the UK’s Monetary Conduct Authority and a fifth regulated by the DIFC within the UAE.
2003–2012: From Public Markets to Non-public Fairness
The general public-markets enterprise was solely half the story. In 2003, Duet formalized a non-public fairness arm, and over the next decade Gabay led the agency into direct management positions in working companies somewhat than portfolio stakes alone. The clearest instance is Dashen Brewery in Ethiopia, the place Duet’s 2012 funding, made alongside UK consumer-goods investor Vasari and Ethiopian endowment fund TIRET Group, was on the time the biggest non-public fairness transaction accomplished within the nation. An identical sample performed out in Nigeria, the place Duet Non-public Fairness took a majority stake in AJEast Nigeria, maker of the BIG Cola beverage manufacturers, and in Moldova, the place the agency acquired the nation’s main electrical energy distribution enterprise in a €141 million deal serving roughly 900,000 prospects.
Every of those offers shared a structural logic: companion with a reputable native operator, take actual board affect somewhat than a passive fairness stake, and maintain the place lengthy sufficient for the underlying market to catch as much as the thesis. Gabay sat on Dashen Brewery’s board from 2012 to 2018. He later chaired the board of Benefit Capital, the Antwerp-based wealth and asset supervisor Duet Non-public Fairness acquired in 2018, a deal that added roughly 2,000 purchasers and pushed the platform additional into fee-based wealth administration alongside its hedge fund and personal fairness traces.
2012–2019: Constructing Throughout A number of Continents
The multi-strategy construction ultimately supported workplaces spanning a number of monetary facilities, and it produced a run of trade recognition that’s unusually broad for a agency of Duet’s measurement. Duet Africa Fund gained the EMG Fairness Fund of the 12 months prize on the 2018 Buyers Selection Awards. Duet Mena Fund took the Fairness Fund of the 12 months prize on the 2015 MENA Fund Supervisor Awards. Duet India Motels was named Finest New Resort of the 12 months at HICSA in 2015 for its Hyderabad property, a part of a hospitality enterprise constructed on a growth alliance with IHG to roll out Vacation Inn Specific resorts throughout India that grew to 6 operational properties with 960 rooms earlier than the platform offered to a conglomerate backed by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund. Dashen Brewery itself picked up two separate non-public fairness trade awards, in 2013 and 2014, earlier than Duet’s Nigerian beverage guess, Huge Bottling Firm, was named Deal of the 12 months on the 2019 Non-public Fairness Africa Awards.
That unfold, throughout hedge funds, long-only methods, non-public fairness and hospitality, is just not the standard profile of a agency that began with $10 million and a single fund. Most managers that start that small both keep slender or fail to outlive a full market cycle. Duet did neither.
In the present day: What the Document Suggests About Diversification
Henry Gabay‘s personal account of the agency’s technique, that funds must be constructed round particular person managers somewhat than a set home view, presents a partial clarification for why the platform diversified as aggressively because it did somewhat than doubling down on its unique technique. Every new fund or acquisition introduced in a supervisor or working staff with a particular edge in a particular market: Ethiopian brewing, Nigerian beverage manufacturing, Moldovan utilities, Indian hospitality, European wealth administration. The through-line connecting them is just not a single asset class however a repeatable course of for figuring out operators with native data and backing them with institutional capital and governance. It’s a slower strategy to construct a agency than choosing one technique and scaling it, and it exhibits up in how lengthy every particular person guess was held somewhat than in how rapidly the platform grew.
Twenty years on, that course of has left Duet with a observe file that spans 4 continents and a number of regulatory regimes, constructed one supervisor, one deal and one fund at a time from a beginning place that almost all institutional allocators would have thought-about too small to matter. The agency’s progress from $10 million to a multi-billion-dollar platform is, in that sense, much less a narrative a few single profitable guess than a few founding construction that was constructed to maintain making new ones.
