Millennium — the biggest hedge fund employer and one of the biggest backers of new funds — is increasingly in a category of its own.
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The manager, founded and still run by Izzy Englander, invests more than $84 billion across hundreds of investing teams.
The firm’s planned absorption of Jain Global — a buzzy fund from Millennium’s former investing head Bobby Jain that launched less than two years ago — is the latest example of how Englander’s firm has evolved into something more closely resembling private equity giants or publicly traded asset managers than a founder-dominated hedge fund. Millennium declined to comment.
The firm’s peers are typically thought of as fellow multistrategy players — Ken Griffin’s Citadel, Steve Cohen’s Point72, D.E. Shaw, and Dmitry Balyasny’s eponymous firm, to name a few. These managers and Millennium have become the epicenter of the hedge-fund world due to their in-demand investing style, which blends teams trading stocks, bonds, commodities, and more to create a portfolio that should make money no matter the market conditions.
Millennium is in an expensive battle for talent with them, with plans to roll out an investing internship for promising grads in 2027.
But the firm has been the most aggressive in accessing trading talent with wads of cash to run at their own firms, putting billions to work outside its walls in recent years. It’s blurred the lines between a hedge fund and a backer of hedge funds, with significant investments in firms like Diego Megia’s Taula Capital and Aaron Weiner’s Atlantic Wolf Capital. It’s also been the only firm in the multistrategy set to pursue the hedge-fund version of M&A.
The firm nearly reeled Schonfeld into its platform in 2023, and Jain was considered a possible rival to Millennium when it launched. Now, it’ll be another contributor to the firm’s bottom line, which has morphed into the ultimate pod shop.
Bigger than ever
Millennium sold a 15% stake that valued the firm at $14 billion last year; it was the capstone on a long-running plan of Englander and his team to have the firm outlive its founder. Investors in Millennium do not have a key-man clause that would allow them to redeem if something happened to Englander, meaning backers are putting their money into the firm because of the name on the front door, not the corner office.
New ownership often comes with pressure to grow, and Millennium has been more willing to take in new capital than its multistrategy peers. The firm is also targeting $5 billion for a new private markets fund.
The new capital has come into the manager’s flagship via a structure more akin to private equity fundraises than a hedge fund cash grab. The manager raised $10 billion in a drawdown fund in 2024 with longer lock-up periods. The drawdown fund means external investors do not give Millennium the money until the firm has identified opportunities to put it to work, allowing the firm to avoid holding excess cash, which can drag down returns.
The manager continues to call that capital as it finds opportunities, including its backing of Jain, a deal expected to close in the third quarter and replenish the roughly $6 billion the firm is returning to its original investors.
By comparison, the largest strategies at firms such as Citadel, Balyasny, D.E. Shaw, Marshall Wace, and Two Sigma are mostly closed to new investor money, people close to these firms tell Business Insider.
The manager’s clout and continued growth ambitions have plenty in the industry bemoaning how top-heavy the space has become.
The head count of Millennium’s army of business development professionals, internal recruiters who vet out possible hires and PMs to back externally, can surpass the total workforce of some smaller funds, for example. The firm’s latest regulatory filings state that more than 6,600 people work at the firm, a jump of more than 1,000 compared to two years ago.
As one executive at a smaller rival said, “We’re all going to work for Millennium someday.”
