GrowthCurve Capital private equity firm uses Google Ads

Sumit Rajpal announced the launch of GrowthCurve Capital, a New York based private equity fund manager. He was the former Co-Chief Investment Officer of the flagship private equity funds, including West Street Capital Partners VII, at Goldman Sachs, the New York based investment bank with a market value of $132 billion.

Rajpal is GrowthCurve’s founder and chief executive. Over the past three decades, the private equity market has matured significantly, he says in a statement. He expects private equity investment gains to shift “from financial engineering to sustainable operational improvement.”

In this environment, GrowthCurve says it will invest in businesses that use artificial intelligence and digital transformation, enabled by human capital, to grow their revenues and profit margins, thereby bringing good, long term gains to institutional investors.

GrowthCurve seeks controlling investments primarily in the financial and information services, healthcare, and technology sectors, emphasizing companies that are information-rich with strong growth potential.

Rajpal has not disclosed how much capital Growth Curve plans to raise for its first fund. Evidently it has bought advertisements on Google search, which have the title: Growth Curve Capital? - A PE firm with a new approach.

A Bombay Univeristy and IIM A graduate

Earlier, Rajpal spent 20 years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as the Global Co-Head of the Merchant Banking Division (MBD) and the Global Co-Head of the Corporate Equity investing businesses. He reportedly led Goldman’s investment in TransUnion, a credit reporting company, that resulted in a gain of $1 billion.

Prior to that, Rajpal was head of Goldman Sachs MBD’s global Financial and Information Services investing business and led the initial build-out of Goldman Sachs’s digital consumer platform, Marcus by Goldman Sachs. He was named partner in 2010.

After he retired from Goldman Sachs in early 2020, Rajpal served as a Senior Policy Advisor to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman on areas of the financial markets impacted by COVID-19. In addition, he co-authored an SEC report titled, U.S. Credit Markets: Interconnectedness and the Effects of the COVID-19 Economic Shock.

Rajpal earned a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Bombay, a postgraduate Management Accountant Certification, and a postgraduate in Business Administration from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India.

Sanjay Swani is chief strategist at Growth Curve

GrowthCurve has a staff of 20 “proven investors and seasoned functional executives.” Its senior managers include Sanjay Swani, Chief Investment Strategist and Head of Technology Investing. He was previously a partner at Tailwind Capital and Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe. Swani earned a BA in molecular biology from Princeton University in 1987 and concurrent degrees from Harvard Law School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1994.

Swani Co-Chairs the Board of Directors for the Partnership Fund for New York City; chairs the Advisory Council for the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies and is a member of the Advisory Council for the Chadha Center for Global India and the President’s Advisory Council at Princeton University.  

Vignesh Aier, head of Healthcare Investing at GrowthCurve, was previously Managing Director, New Mountain Capital. He graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Economics-Mathematics and also studied at the London School of Economics. He was born in India, where he first developed his love of elephants, tigers, and other wildlife, according to his profile on World Wild Life Foundation where he is a member of its National Council.  

GrowthCurve’s ten advisers include Mihir A. Desai, Professor of Finance, Harvard Business School and Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; and Siddharth “Bobby” Mehta, the former chief executive of TransUnion.

In a statement, Rajpal noted that GrowthCurve brings “together some of the most talented people I have known and worked with during my career.”  

Editorial Comment: Are Indian Professionals in the U.S. proud of a minority label

 

Typically, private equity, venture capital and other investment firms raise most of their capital from pension funds and university endowments. The pension funds and endowments seek to hire more minority owned investment firms. In recent years, they have been hiring Indian owned investment firms since Indians, being Asian, are considered a minority.

The term “minority” in this context is not a statistical measure. It is applied to various groups in the U.S. who hold few or no positions of power.

But the pension funds and endowments ignore that, unlike Blacks and Hispanics, Indians do not qualify as minorities. Indian professionals in the U.S. are almost all from middle-or-upper class families, who were educated at good schools and colleges in India and the U.S. Also, except for descendants of Sikh farmers who migrated to the U.S. in the early 20th century, none of them suffered any historical discrimination and economic hardships in America.

The original goal for including Asians among minorities was to help uplift the historically disadvantaged people from Hawaii, Guam, Samoa and other U.S. jurisdictions in Asia and the Pacific, descendants of nineteenth century Chinese railroad workers and Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War Two.

Indian professionals face rising criticism from minorities, White Americans as well as conservative and right-wing politicians for securing minority business contracts and jobs.

In this environment, Indian fund managers should tell the pension funds and endowments that hire them that they be excluded from lists they compile to show their commitment to meeting diversity goals. This will ensure that the employers hire Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other minorities, who legitimately qualify.  

Also, it is in the self-interest of Indian professionals to clearly establish that their hiring was based on merit. Otherwise, their business achievements will be doubted, even as they are burdened with the label of being hired to fill minority quotas. This experience would be similar to that of minorities who meet the intent of diversity goals. There is an underlying and often unfounded assumption that such minorities do not possess the requisite qualifications and skills.  

Most Indian professionals in America – from chief executives Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Anjali Sud at Vimeo and Sonia Syngal at Gap; Ajit Jain, vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway; Srikant Datar, dean of the Harvard Business School; Vanita Gupta, Associate U.S. Attorney General; and on down – deserve their success given their educational credentials, training and skills. So, it should be unsettling for them to be counted and represented as evidence of ethnically diverse “minority” hiring.

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