October 2025 Recap

Biotech’s strong performance run continued in October, with the disclosed holdings of our Biotech group up 9% for the month and now up 32% for the year. Among the 15 top-performing stocks that are widely held by OWL managers, 11 of them are Biotech or Healthcare-focused. Japan, Financials, and REIT managers had a tougher month in October.

As a reminder, the table below is based on our “OWL Groups” – curated lists of over 500 managers frequently found in leading allocators’ portfolios. These lists are categorized by geography, sector, and style, enabling our users to easily monitor groups of managers and their underlying disclosed holdings. All returns shown are estimates based on publicly disclosed holdings.  

For our users, last Friday’s newsletter included a list of managers that had the best and worst performance in October.

Zeev Ventures

Last week, we shared details on one of the biggest updates in OWL’s history – a customized news feed that allows users to track daily news articles and other content about the managers they care about. OWL now ingests news and other content from hundreds of sources and uses multiple LLMs to filter, tag, and summarize the articles, showing only what’s meaningful and relevant for each manager.

One article in the newsfeed that caught our attention last week was about Zeev Ventures, a VC firm based in Palo Alto backed by MIT, the McKinsey Retirement Trust, and the Karsh Family Foundation.

Zeev Ventures was founded by Oren Zeev in 2007, and he remains the only employee despite managing nearly $5 billion in capital. Self-described as a “one man venture capitalist,” Zeev spent twelve years at Apax Capital before striking out on his own.

His first outside investor was Peter Thiel. In the CNBC article, Zeev noted that he met with Thiel and “I came out of that meeting with a fund I did not know I was raising.” Thiel invested $18 million in the first fund, Zeev invested $2 million of his own capital, and Zeev Ventures was born. Zeev is estimated to have more than $1 billion in proceeds from the recent Navan IPO, which is meaningful for someone who takes most of his meetings in a coffee shop. LPs also note Zeev’s unusual fee structure, where all management fees are invested back into the funds. Collectively across Zeev’s 11 funds, approximately 9% of the $4.8 billion is internal capital, which OWL users can see on our internal capital tracker.

Other News/Events

• Millennium targets $5bn for new private markets fund

• 'Big Short' investor Michael Burry is back with a bubble warning after 2 years of silence

• Profile of Oren Zeev (Zeev Ventures)

• a16z general partner Anjney Midha leaving to launch AMP

• Ribbit Capital White Paper: "The Token Revolution"

• Alfred Lin, Inside Sequoia: $43B+ Distributed to Their Investors Since 2020

• How Short Sellers Are Surviving a Crazy Bull Market — While Waiting for It to End

• UK Universities Seed Fossil-Free Investment Fund With More Than $670M

• Lone Pine Bets on Etsy

• Bowdoin Reports 15.3% FY25 Return

• University of Illinois Reports 3.3% FY25 Return

• Cornell Reports 12.3% FY25 Return

• Columbia Reports 12.4% FY25 Return

• Yale Reports 11.1% FY25 Return

• Dartmouth Reports 10.8% FY25 Return

• Penn State Reports 8.4% FY Return

   

About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.