EQUIAM

Founder and CEO Ziad Makkawi chairs EQUIAM's Investment Committee. He is joined by Founding Partner John Zic, who built the systematic screening model, and Partners Arin Nazarian and Joe Day, who lead deal execution and quantitative analysis. Makkawi also sits on the investment committees of the Dubai Future District Fund and advises the $200 million Indian growth fund Playbook.

EQUIAM sources primarily through direct secondary transactions, partnering with brokerage platforms Forge, Caplight, Setter, and Hiive, alongside bulge-bracket secondary desks at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Macquarie. It also accesses proprietary flow through other GP relationships and direct employee or HR networks, screening a mapped universe of more than 2,600 Series B+ companies.

The Private Alpha strategy covers the broad venture universe of roughly 3,000 Series B+ companies with wider outcome dispersion. The Private Tech 30 strategy concentrates on approximately 30 of the 100 largest U.S. private tech companies, each requiring more than $100 million in trailing-twelve-month confirmed revenue and Tier 1 VC backing, targeting a 12–36 month IPO horizon.

EQUIAM executes both. The firm reports a sourcing split of approximately 70 to 80 percent secondary transactions and 20 to 30 percent primary investments as of its latest fund. Most secondaries involve purchasing employee or early-investor stakes directly, closing $1 million to $10 million positions within two to three weeks.

EQUIAM requires 100 percent access to company financials before committing; it then models four to six probability-weighted scenarios for each share class on the cap table. The firm deploys proprietary tooling and automation to confirm a margin of safety and only bids when the price clears against those exit scenarios, leading to an all-cash, no-holdback close.

EQUIAM states it has invested in 90 companies and achieved more than 30 exits since 2018. Its Private Tech 30 Fund I reports a 1.86x DPI, which the firm places in the 99th percentile of venture returns, according to its own disclosures. The firm does not publicly release full fund-level IRR or TVPI figures.

EQUIAM describes itself as sector-agnostic, executing where systematic screening identifies mispriced opportunities. Its stated investment themes include financial infrastructure, intelligence layer, cloud and compute, and frontier technologies, with no explicit negative sector exclusions published.