Lauren Taylor Wolfe left the hedge fund she had worked at for 10 years to launch the first female- and minority-owned activist fund, Impactive Capital.
It’s rare for a woman to start a hedge fund—less than 5 percent of hedge funds have female founders. But the shareholder activism arena is even more exclusively male-dominated. What’s particularly unusual about Impactive Capital is that its activist targets have an ESG twist, a strategy that other activist hedge funds have now started to embrace.
The firm got off the ground in 2019 with a six-year, $250 million capital commitment from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. Wolfe and Impactive cofounder Christian Alejandro Asmar are veterans of the $3 billion Blue Harbour Group, where they were both managing directors and investing partners.
At Blue Harbour, Taylor Wolfe led many of the firm’s investments and advised CEOs and boards on capital allocation, strategic opportunities and ESG considerations. A native New Yorker, Taylor Wolfe is a graduate of Cornell University and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
