Fund Manager Who Backed Palantir Raises Funds for New Long-Term Capital Firm

(Bloomberg) -- Burak Alici, a veteran Morgan Stanley mutual fund manager, is starting his own firm to invest in public and private companies through a permanent-capital vehicle, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Qvidtvm Inc. is seeking to raise $100 million to $200 million, using a C-corp structure that caters to family offices in which investors lock up capital for years, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the firm hasn’t officially launched. The vehicle, which the firm plans to list as a publicly traded conglomerate, will focus on equity investments in consumer goods, industrials and digital companies.

Alici, 43, left Morgan Stanley Investment Management earlier this year after working there since 2007, managing the Global Discovery Portfolio. The fund has outperformed about 97% of its peers in the past three years, helped in part by bets on Bernard Arnault’s Christian Dior SE as well as early investments in Dropbox Inc., Airbnb Inc., Blue Bottle Coffee Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc., the controversial data-mining company co-founded by Peter Thiel.

He is bringing Morgan Stanley alumna Nina Murphy with him as chief operating officer as well as Max Schwendner, formerly of JPMorgan Chase & Co., as director of private investments, the person said. The team has started investing as it raises funds, taking a stake in Italian coffee company Ditta Artigianale.

Representatives for Qvidtvm and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

The firm, whose name comes from a Latin phrase translated as what next, is launching at a time when more investors are willing to make longer-duration capital commitments to seek better returns. They’re wagering that buying equity in companies in the private market and tying that money up as the investment matures will yield more than the shorter holding period of hedge funds, for example. Warren Buffett built his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. around such a buy-and-hold model of investing.

The Turkish-born Alici holds degrees from Columbia University, Boston College and Bogazici University in Istanbul. He will be based in Texas, while the rest of the investment team is in New York.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nikolaj Gammeltoft in New York at ngammeltoft@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nikolaj Gammeltoft at ngammeltoft@bloomberg.net, ;Alan Mirabella at amirabella@bloomberg.net, Josh Friedman, Dan Reichl

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