Kennedy Lewis Investment Management

Co-founders David Chene and Darren Richman share day-to-day investment leadership. Chene spent more than a decade at KKR, most recently as a senior member of the firm's credit and special situations group. Richman was a managing director at Goldman Sachs, where his focus included structured finance and principal credit investing. The investment committee draws directly on both partners' institutional underwriting experience.

The firm underwrites opportunistic, event-driven credit across private loans, structured equity, and distressed or special situations. Mandates include first-lien and mezzanine financing, rescue lending, and preferred equity structured alongside operational turnarounds. The strategy is deliberately unconstrained by sector or geography, targeting mid-market complexity that large alternative managers often bypass.

Kennedy Lewis is an institutional asset manager, not a family office. It is registered with the SEC as an investment adviser and raises capital through commingled opportunity funds from institutional allocators and family offices. The firm's name derives from the founders' surnames, not from a single-family wealth mandate.

Kennedy Lewis typically leads or co-leads its own transactions, given the opportunistic and structured nature of its credit book. The firm's model relies on bilateral negotiation with sponsors and corporates rather than passive co-investment alongside third-party managers. When the capital requirement or risk structure merits it, the firm can bring in co-investor capital alongside its own fund commitment.

The firm sources through a network of intermediaries, restructuring advisors, and special situations desks at bulge-bracket banks—relationships cultivated across the founders' prior tenures at KKR and Goldman Sachs. Origination focuses on mid-market financing dislocations that fall outside traditional bank mandates. The partners' institutional backgrounds give them direct access to sponsor-led and advisor-led processes across North America and Western Europe.