Edward Talmor-Gera

Founder & CEO NewVest

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Edward Talmor-Gera is the founder and chief executive of NewVest, an asset manager built on a proposition that private equity had spent forty years insisting was impossible: that you can index it. NewVest’s funds take a vintage year, identify the fifty largest private equity or private debt funds raising in it, and give investors proportional exposure to that set — the private-markets analogue of buying the index rather than picking the manager. The structural argument is about cost as much as access: NewVest offers a no-management-fee option at the firm level, which in an industry organised around two-and-twenty is the whole point. Talmor-Gera came to this after roughly two decades in financial services — investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Rothschild, investing at the Israeli family office Arison Investments, and co-founding Fund Placement Israel, a placement agent that has raised over $5bn in limited-partner commitments and therefore gave him an unusually close view of how private funds are actually sold. The firm launched its first funds in 2023, reached $430m of assets by late 2024, and in September 2025 partnered with S&P Dow Jones Indices to turn the approach into a published benchmark series.

Career Highlights

• Founded NewVest and launched the first investable passive private-markets index funds, PE50 2023 and PD50 2023, which together raised $250m and took commitments in 92 of the largest private equity and private debt funds of that vintage.
• Closed PE50 2024 at $180m in November 2024, a 30 per cent increase on its predecessor, bringing firmwide assets under management to $430m.
• Built the firm around a no-management-fee option, charging only a low carry — a structural departure from the traditional private-equity fee model.
• Partnered with S&P Dow Jones Indices on the S&P Private Equity 50 index series, announced 30 September 2025, covering the 2023 and 2024 vintages with both S&P 500 and SOFR reserve variants.
• Co-founded Fund Placement Israel, a boutique private capital placement agent that has raised more than $5bn of new limited-partner commitments.
• Leads private equity teaching at the Israel Finance Institute, lectures at the Israel College of Management, and is Private Equity Industry Coach at London Business School.
• Held finance and investment banking roles at Arison Investments, Goldman Sachs and Rothschild, and began his career at Sotheby’s after serving as a captain in a special forces unit of the Israel Defence Forces.
• Speaks regularly on private capital markets, including at SuperReturn North America and the Milken Institute Middle East and Africa Summit.

Professional Journey

Talmor-Gera served as a captain in a special forces unit of the Israel Defence Forces and began his civilian career at Sotheby’s before moving into finance. He held roles across investment banking and principal investing — at Rothschild and Goldman Sachs, and at Arison Investments, one of Israel’s largest family offices — accumulating what his biography describes as more than twenty years in financial services, of which more than a decade has been in private markets specifically, in both commercial and academic capacities.

The academic strand is not decorative. He leads private equity teaching at the Israel Finance Institute, lectures at the Israel College of Management, and serves as Private Equity Industry Coach at London Business School, where he took his own Executive MBA. Teaching an asset class while selling into it gave him a particular vantage on its inefficiencies, and he has cited early mentorship in private markets from an LBS professor as formative.

Before NewVest he co-founded Fund Placement Israel, a boutique placement agent raising capital for private investment firms from Israeli limited partners. FPI has placed more than $5bn of new LP relationships, and the work meant seeing, repeatedly, which funds institutional investors could actually get into and on what terms. The gap he identified was structural: access to the largest and most sought-after private funds is rationed by relationship, and the fee load compounds across a fund-of-funds or feeder structure until much of the asset class’s premium has been paid away before it reaches the investor.

NewVest is the answer he built. Rather than selecting managers, its funds construct a rules-based basket of the fifty largest private equity or private debt funds raising in a given vintage year — PE50 and PD50 — and hold them passively. The first two vehicles, both 2023 vintage, raised $250m between them and took commitments in 92 underlying funds. PE50 2024 closed at $180m in November 2024, targeting fifty funds that were collectively raising over $370bn, and lifted the firm to $430m under management. Talmor-Gera has argued publicly that the benefits passive investing brought to public markets — lower cost, breadth, predictability of exposure — have an analogue in private markets, and that the reason they have not arrived is structural rather than theoretical.

The September 2025 collaboration with S&P Dow Jones Indices extended the idea from a product to a public standard. The resulting S&P Private Equity 50 index series publishes rules-based benchmarks for the 2023 and 2024 vintages, in both S&P 500 and SOFR reserve variants, giving institutional investors a transparent yardstick for North American and European private equity where previously there was mostly self-reported manager data. Talmor-Gera framed it in characteristically blunt terms, arguing that private markets have become too important to remain opaque.

Education

London Business School

Executive MBA, Business Administration