The buzziest hedge fund launch this year is ex-Sequoia investor Jeff Wang's. Here's who it's hired and how much it's raised.

Former Sequoia investor Jeff Wang is close to launching one of the biggest hedge funds this year.

Wang’s Augnition Global Investors is set to start trading in October with more than $2 billion in assets, two people close to the manager told Business Insider.

The launch was the talk of Morgan Stanley’s popular Breakers conference at the start of the year; two attendees told Business Insider at the time that they expected Augnition to raise at least $1 billion. A person close to the manager said that Wang and his number two Alan Lo were planning to invest a significant amount of their personal wealth in the new firm.

A representative for the fund declined to comment.

The manager, which will be based out of Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, will invest in public and private companies, Business Insider previously reported. It’s launching with a team of at least 5, including investors from Ziff Brothers’ spin-off Crescent Park Management and Kodai Capital.

The serious interest from the allocator community is not surprising: Wang ran Sequoia’s global equities business, writing on LinkedIn that assets grew from $600 million to more than $9 billion under his decade-plus tenure atop the unit. His post said the fund returned roughly 17% annually under his management.

Wang and Lo, a former SRS Investment Management executive, have built out their team with hires on the investing team and the business side.

The new hires include:

Joe Mitchell, chief financial officer, previously a managing director at Hurricane Capital and an alum of Goldman Sachs
Jeffrey Su, investor and partner, who cofounded tech-stock-focused Crescent Park Management in 2014
Sung Choi, investor and partner, who most recently worked for Neville Shah’s now-shut-down Kodai Capital
Monica Shi, analyst, who recently completed her MBA at Stanford after working at McKinsey and private equity firm Francisco Partners

Fundamental stockpickers have been in high demand. A recent Goldman Sachs survey of hedge-fund backers found that 30% of respondents were planning to increase their exposure to long-short equity funds in the second half of the year, the most of any hedge fund subsector.

Launching a new manager has become easier thanks to multistrategy firms like Izzy Englander’s Millennium increasingly putting money to work outside their four walls. In the first quarter, there were more than 160 launches, according to Hedge Fund Research, the most in a single three-month stretch since 2022.