UC Investments

Jagdeep Singh Bachher has served as Chief Investment Officer and Vice President of Investments since April 2014. He reports directly to the UC Board of Regents and oversees a team of roughly 70 investment professionals in Oakland. Bachher previously spent five years as Executive Vice President and CIO at Alberta Investment Management Corporation.

The bulk of the University of California's retirement, endowment, and working capital assets are pooled into a single consolidated investment fund managed by the Oakland-based central office. Individual campuses retain some restricted endowment assets, but the dominant share is centrally managed, giving the system a combined negotiating strength most peer universities lack.

UC Investments uses a hybrid model. It makes long-term fund commitments to external managers across venture capital, private equity, real assets, and hedge funds. Simultaneously, it runs an active co-investment program that takes direct equity stakes alongside its GP partners. Notable direct positions have included Impossible Foods and a multi-billion-dollar separately managed real estate account with Blackstone.

Two structural channels provide distinct sourcing. First, its tenure and scale with top-quartile California venture firms (Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark) grant early access to co-investment allocations in late-stage private companies. Second, the UC Ventures initiative specifically targets commercializable technology emerging from the University of California's ten-campus research ecosystem — a pipeline unavailable to other public pension funds.

The Regents have adopted policy restricting investment in companies with substantial revenues from thermal coal and oil sands extraction, following UC's formal environmental, social, and governance framework adopted in 2015. The portfolio has also exited most tobacco-related public equities. Beyond these exclusions, the office maintains broad sector flexibility across its private and public books.

UC Ventures is a dedicated investment program housed within UC Investments that backs startups founded by UC faculty, students, or alumni, or built on UC-licensed intellectual property. The program allows the university system to recycle its own research output into financial returns, creating a flywheel no other US public pension fund can replicate at equivalent scale.

UC Investments actively pursues co-investment rights in its private equity and real asset portfolios. By writing large fund commitments, the office negotiates for the ability to invest additional capital directly alongside its GP relationships without paying incremental management fees. The December 2023 Blackstone BREIT transaction, which provided favorable economics in exchange for long-duration capital, exemplifies this negotiating posture.