Altimeter Capital
Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
Sources
15 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,841 words
Improve this article
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Suggest edit
CtrlK
Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
Sources
15 citations
Review status
Source-backed
Revision
v1 · 1,841 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Altimeter Capital is a technology investment firm founded in 2008 by Brad Gerstner. It runs both a public-markets hedge fund and a series of private growth-equity funds, and is best known for a "crossover" strategy that backs the same technology companies on both sides of the public-private divide. The firm built its reputation on concentrated, long-horizon bets on software and internet platforms, most famously an early stake in Snowflake that became one of the most profitable venture positions of the 2010s. Since 2023, Altimeter has positioned itself as one of the most vocal and active investors in artificial intelligence, with large public positions in Nvidia and CoreWeave and a private stake in Anthropic that Altimeter helped lead to a $965 billion valuation in 2026. Gerstner has become a prominent public commentator on technology investing, co-hosting the widely followed BG2 podcast with venture investor Bill Gurley.
Gerstner launched Altimeter Capital in August 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts, raising less than $3 million from friends and family in the middle of the global financial crisis. He opened a second office in Menlo Park, California, about a month after the firm started, and the firm today operates from both locations. Before founding Altimeter, Gerstner had been a portfolio manager at PAR Capital from 2005 to 2008, a founding principal at venture firm General Catalyst, and an operator and investor in travel startups; earlier still he had practiced securities law and served as a deputy secretary of state in Indiana.
The firm grew quickly on the strength of concentrated technology bets. Its flagship public-equity fund averaged annual returns of roughly 29.5 percent from 2011 through 2021, according to figures cited in the firm's own materials. Altimeter raised its first dedicated venture fund in 2013 at $75 million and went on to raise a series of private growth-equity vehicles with committed capital ranging from tens of millions to a few hundred million dollars each.
Altimeter is structured as a hybrid, or "crossover," manager. On the public side it runs a long/short hedge fund focused on technology, internet, and software companies. On the private side it runs growth-equity funds that invest in late-stage and, increasingly, earlier-stage private technology companies. The thesis behind the structure is that following a company from its private rounds through its public listing gives the firm deeper conviction and better information than a manager confined to one market.
The model produces a meaningful gap between the firm's regulatory public filings and its total footprint. Altimeter's public US equity portfolio, disclosed quarterly in Form 13F filings, was reported at roughly $5.7 billion as of the first quarter of 2026, down from about $6.7 billion the prior period. Counting both public and private vehicles, the firm's total assets under management have been cited at more than $15 billion in 2022 and at around $16 billion in a 2021 regulatory filing connected to Grab; one 2026 estimate put the combined figure near $20 billion. Because the private side is not disclosed in the same way as the public book, total AUM figures vary by source and date and should be read as approximate.
As of the first quarter of 2026, Altimeter's disclosed 13F portfolio was highly concentrated, with the top five positions accounting for roughly three-quarters of the public book. The largest holdings were Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Uber, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Microsoft. During that quarter the firm added to several names, including Arm, Nvidia, Uber, CoreWeave, Axon, Meta, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Broadcom, a tilt that reflects Gerstner's stated conviction in AI infrastructure and compute. The firm fully exited its Chinese technology positions over the course of 2025.
This concentration is characteristic of Altimeter. Rather than spreading capital across dozens of names, the firm has historically held a small number of high-conviction positions and sized them aggressively, accepting volatility in exchange for the chance at outsized returns.
Altimeter's pivot toward artificial intelligence has been the defining feature of its recent investing. In late 2022 and 2023, Gerstner moved heavily into Nvidia and began publicly describing an "AI supercycle," arguing that demand for accelerated computing would drive a multi-year boom in data-center spending. Nvidia became the firm's largest public position.
The firm extended that thesis into AI infrastructure with CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs. Altimeter was an investor in CoreWeave while it was still private; after CoreWeave's 2025 initial public offering, Altimeter opened and then sharply increased a public position, buying roughly 3.2 million shares for about $230 million and then adding a further $326 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, its largest single addition that quarter. Gerstner has argued that CoreWeave "stands alone" among neocloud providers because of its scale and its close relationship with Nvidia.
On the private side, Altimeter co-led the largest startup financing in history. On May 28, 2026, Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, with Altimeter named among the co-leads alongside Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital; additional co-leads included Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. The round was announced the same day Anthropic released its Claude Opus 4.8 model and was widely described as likely the company's last private raise before an expected initial public offering. The valuation placed Anthropic above OpenAI, which had raised $122 billion in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation. Gerstner said in the announcement that "Claude's latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world's most demanding organizations" and that the momentum "positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation." Altimeter's AI thesis spans both model developers and the agentic and compute layers around them.
The table below summarizes selected investments associated with Altimeter, with the firm's role attributed where it has been disclosed. Round leadership is noted only where Altimeter has been publicly identified as a lead or co-lead investor.
| Company | Round / Year | Altimeter's role |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake | Private rounds, then 2020 IPO | Early investor; held about 13 percent of shares shortly after the September 2020 IPO |
| Anthropic | Series H, May 2026 | Co-lead investor (with Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia and others) |
| Nvidia | Public position, 2022 onward | Largest disclosed public holding; central to the "AI supercycle" thesis |
| CoreWeave | Private, then 2025 IPO | Pre-IPO investor; large public position added through 2025 |
| Grab | SPAC merger, 2021 | Sponsor via Altimeter Growth Corp; $750 million PIPE commitment |
| Uber | Public position | Significant disclosed holding |
| Plaid | Private | Growth-equity investor |
| Roblox | Private | Growth-equity investor |
| SoFi | Private | Growth-equity investor |
Other companies the firm has been associated with over time include Expedia, HubSpot, Twilio, Epic Games, and 23andMe. Altimeter was also an investor in the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which collapsed in 2022.
Brad Gerstner was born May 4, 1971, in Goshen, Indiana. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science, summa cum laude, from Wabash College in 1993, a JD from Indiana University's Maurer School of Law in 1996, and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2000. He is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Altimeter and remains its public face.
Gerstner has a long record of shareholder activism and public commentary. In 2016 he pushed for board change at United Continental Holdings. On October 24, 2022, he published an open letter to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and the company's board titled "Time to Get Fit," arguing that Meta had "drifted into the land of excess" with too many employees and too much metaverse spending. He recommended cutting headcount expense by about 20 percent and capping annual metaverse investment at $5 billion. Meta's stock had fallen sharply in the preceding period, and the company announced layoffs of more than 11,000 people the following month. Gerstner has also been recognized on the Forbes Midas List for his Snowflake and Grab investments.
During the 2020 to 2021 boom in special purpose acquisition companies, Altimeter sponsored two blank-check vehicles. Altimeter Growth Corp listed on the Nasdaq in September 2020, raising $450 million. In April 2021 it agreed to merge with Grab, the Southeast Asian ride-hailing and delivery company, in what was then the largest SPAC deal on record, with an implied equity value of roughly $40 billion. Altimeter committed $750 million to the accompanying private investment in public equity, or PIPE, alongside investors such as BlackRock, Fidelity, and T. Rowe Price. Grab completed the merger and began trading in December 2021, though its shares fell sharply on the first day. A second vehicle, Altimeter Growth Corp 2, raised $450 million on the New York Stock Exchange in early 2021 but was wound down in December 2022 without completing a deal, mirroring the broader collapse of the SPAC market.
Since 2023, Gerstner has co-hosted the BG2 podcast with Bill Gurley, a longtime general partner at Benchmark. The show, sometimes styled BG2Pod, publishes roughly twice a month and covers technology, markets, investing, and economic policy, and has featured guests including Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. The podcast has amplified Gerstner's views on AI infrastructure, public-market valuations, and US technology competitiveness, making him one of the more visible hedge-fund voices in the AI debate alongside firms such as Andreessen Horowitz on the venture side. In 2025 Gerstner founded the Invest America Foundation, a philanthropic effort tied to a policy idea for seeding investment accounts for children.