Hillhouse Capital

Lei Zhang is founder, chairman and chief executive. He took a bachelor's degree in economics from Renmin University of China in 1994, then studied at Yale, where a class taught by David Swensen led to an internship at the Yale endowment and his first job in finance; he holds an MBA and an MA in international relations from Yale, both awarded in 2002. Swensen remained a mentor and Yale an early backer of the firm.

Tracy Ma is founding partner and co-president and was Hillhouse's first employee in 2005, since working across the firm's investment, value creation and business teams. She holds an MBA from Chicago Booth, an MS in management from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a BS from Beijing Normal University. Wei Cao is a partner and runs a team covering emerging consumer brands.

Lei Zhang founded Hillhouse in June 2005 with $20 million of seed capital from the Yale University endowment, allocated by then chief investment officer David Swensen. The firm takes its name from Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, where Yale's investment office sat. Assets compounded from that base to $73.3 billion by 2021, with more recent reporting placing the figure above $63 billion.

In February 2020 Hillhouse carved out a dedicated early-stage arm, GL Ventures, capitalised with RMB 10 billion, about $1.42 billion, to write rounds from RMB 3 million to $30 million across biomedicine and medical devices, software-as-a-service and core technology, consumer internet, and emerging consumer brands; GL Ventures has made roughly 70 investments. In October 2021 the firm raised $18 billion for its fifth flagship private equity fund, then the largest pan-Asia vehicle ever raised, exceeding KKR's $15 billion fund closed the same year. The firm has since been reported to be planning an $8 billion buyout fund.