Washington University Portfolio Update

This week, we’ll take a look at Washington University (WashU)’s portfolio, which we last profiled in June 2025. Led by CIO Scott Wilson, the endowment has maintained its heavy weighting towards private investments that it has adopted since Wilson joined in 2017, according to its FY 2025 Annual Report (which users can now access on WashU’s data room on OWL, along with previous years’ reports).

That exposure to private investments generated a meaningful return (65%) in 2021, the highest of all endowments tracked by OWL that year. Its private exposure has muted returns in the last few years, but the university remains among the top 10 best-performing university endowments for both 5 and 10-year returns, according to OWL’s Endowment Returns table.

In last week’s newsletter, users received a list of select public and private managers in WashU’s portfolio, one of which was Kora Management. WashU first disclosed a relationship with Kora in 2020 when it disclosed roughly $125 million in holdings across two of the manager’s funds. Today, its disclosed holdings in Kora funds total over $157 million, including a new commitment as of last year to Kora’s 2025-vintage fourth fund.

Based in Brooklyn, Kora was founded in 2013 by Nitin Saigal and Daniel Jacobs, who now serve as co-CIOs. Saigal earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and an MBA from Harvard before beginning his career as an analyst at Blackstone Group. He then spent more than eight years as a senior analyst at Bridger Capital before departing to found Kora.

Jacobs also attended Harvard, earning a bachelor’s degree in history and literature, before starting his career as an analyst at JPMorgan. He then spent over five years as an investment manager at Tree Line before a brief stint at Bridger. He overlapped with Saigal for about six months, though the pair already knew each other from Harvard, according to Kora’s website.

Kora primarily targets investments in emerging markets and maintains multiple research offices around the world including in São Paulo, Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, and Singapore. The manager organizes its portfolio into “clusters,” its two largest being emerging internet and niche finance, to allow it to engage in serial specialization across geographies.

Kora’s largest disclosed position is in Sea Limited, a Singapore-based consumer internet company, a position that is valued at just over $300 million as of 6/17.

The manager has actively traded the company since it first initiated its position in early 2018, leading to an estimated profit of over $630 million, according to OWL data.

Given its self-described concentrated strategy, one can see the similarities between Sea’s stock chart and Kora’s AUM since it first initiated its position in the company.

As we discussed two weeks ago, WashU reportedly invested $50 million in SpaceX around 2016. Bloomberg estimated the stake to generate a more than 3,000% return and make up over 10% of the endowment’s $17 billion value before the company’s IPO last Friday.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that WashU invested alongside Vy Capital into SpaceX in 2018, and there is a tax filing that discloses a $57 million investment made by WashU around that time into "Vy Space", an entity that has grown its AUM from $148 million at that time to over $10.8 billion as of March 2026. Vy has two additional vehicles with similar names with additional AUM of $9.5 billion.

SpaceX IPO’d at $135 per share and, after jumping to as much as $230, has since settled at roughly $155 as of market close June 22nd, which means WashU’s stake could be worth roughly $2 billion as of publishing.

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.

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. Certain investment managers, funds, or limited partners (“LPs”) referenced herein may be current or prospective clients of Old Well Labs, and Old Well Labs may have business relationships with such parties. Accordingly, references to any manager, fund, or LP should not be construed as an endorsement, recommendation, or solicitation. 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.