Equity Alliance

Adrienne Rees serves as CIO and Managing Partner, leading the firm's investment activity alongside CEO and Managing Partner Claude Grunitzky. Partner Adam Kiki-Charles rounds out the core investing team. The board — which includes Kenneth Lerer, Michael Novogratz, and Eric Zinterhofer — provides governance but the named managing partners direct day-to-day investment decisions.

The firm sources primarily through commitments to emerging venture capital fund managers from historically undercapitalized groups. Once inside those fund portfolios, the Equity Alliance identifies standout companies for direct co-investment, relying on the fund managers' own sourcing and due diligence. The board and advisory network — spanning Lerer Hippeau, Galaxy Digital, Searchlight Capital, and HPS Partners — provides additional proprietary origination channels.

It is neither. The Equity Alliance is structured as a private equity asset manager — specifically a fund-of-funds with a direct co-investment sleeve — not a single-family office, despite its founding by a concentrated group of high-profile individuals. It raises third-party capital and invests thematically rather than managing a single family's balance sheet.

The firm does both. It makes fund commitments to early-stage venture capital managers and pursues direct investments in portfolio companies already backed by those funds. The website specifies that it does not accept unsolicited company pitches; direct investments are reserved for founders who have already received investment from a portfolio fund.

The firm invests in early-stage venture — spanning startup, early-stage, and growth — through the fund managers it backs. Its own direct investments follow those same managers into their portfolio companies, effectively participating across the early-stage lifecycle without running a primary origination program.

Principals from these firms — Kenneth Lerer and Benjamin Lerer (Lerer Hippeau), Michael Novogratz (Galaxy Investment Partners), and Eric Zinterhofer (Searchlight Capital) — are founding investors in the Equity Alliance and serve on its board of directors. Their firms are not subsidiaries or parents but strategic partners who embed their networks and deal flow into the Alliance's investment process.

The firm's direct investment mandate is built on co-investing alongside the GPs in its fund portfolio. Rather than competing for proprietary deal flow, the Alliance uses its LP relationships to access co-investment opportunities that the underlying fund managers choose to syndicate, aligning interests between the fund commitments and the direct portfolio.