UTIMCO's Best Performing Managers

Last week, we dug into newly disclosed manager returns from UTIMCO, spanning both hedge funds and private investments. Public institutions (state universities, pensions, etc.) sometimes release detailed manager-level data like this, but it’s often buried or difficult to gain access to. OWL will continue to make this type of data more accessible, further building what we believe is the world’s most comprehensive allocator dataset.

In Friday’s customer newsletter, we shared the 20 best performing hedge funds in UTIMCO’s portfolio. Notably, 4 of the top 20 are D.E. Shaw funds. As we wrote about in a prior Insights, UTIMCO has a relatively large allocation to large quant/multi-manager platforms compared to other endowments. We noted in January that nearly 15% of the portfolio is comprised of investments in Marshall Wace, Balyasny, D.E. Shaw, Two Sigma, Exodus Point, Millennium, and Walleye. Other top performers for UTIMCO’s hedge fund portfolio include Slate Path and D1 Capital.

On the private side, UTIMCO’s best returns are heavily focused on VC investments. In Friday’s newsletter, we also included a list of UTIMCO’s 20 most successful VC relationships. Rolling up funds at the manager level, Union Square Ventures has generated more than $1 billion in profits for UTIMCO over the past 20 years. The bulk of the $1.2 billion in profits has come from their 2004 and 2012 vintage funds. Other top performers include Spark Capital and IA Ventures.

Renovus Capital Partners

Renovus Capital Partners has been a high-performing manager for UTIMCO, with IRRs of 71% and 47% on their 2016 and 2017 vintage funds, respectively. UTIMCO also invested $20 million in two new funds in 2024. Renovus was founded by Bradley Whitman, Atif Gilani, and Jesse Serventi in 2010, spinning out from Leeds Equity Partners, an education-focused private equity firm in New York.

Bradley Whitman, Jesse Serventi, and Atif Gilani

The firm is a lower middle-market private equity firm focused on the Knowledge and Talent industries, specifically investing in education, healthcare services, technology services, and professional services. The firm prefers to invest in founder-led businesses and is often the first source of institutional capital for its portfolio companies.

Renovus received its SBIC license in 2011, enabling it to invest in small businesses in partnership with the Small Business Administration (SBA). Licensed and regulated by the SBA, SBICs pair private equity or debt commitments with low-cost leverage guaranteed by the federal government, increasing investment capacity.

Based outside of Philadelphia, Renovus’s AUM has more than doubled over the last 5 years:

Most recently, the firm raised $875 million for the Renovus Capital Partners IV Core Buyout fund, according to a WSJ article. Of the $875 million committed, $50 million was internal capital, a higher-than-average GP commitment. The firm also closed a $325 million continuation fund in 2024 and deployed more than $100 million across the two funds during the first half of 2025. As evidenced in UTIMCO’s data, Renovus has performed consistently well in recent years, and in April, was ranked first in the HEC Paris Dow Jones Small Cap Buyout Performance Ranking for the third consecutive year.

Product Reminder – Strategy Tags

Renovus is a good example of a manager that can be discovered using OWL’s new detailed strategy tags, including one for SBIC funds. On the main manager table in OWL, 58 managers are listed under the SBIC tag, and these tags can also be applied to OWL’s map search. For example, below you can see SBIC managers in New York City:

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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

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.