Former Cornell Investment Officer Announces Launch of New Private Equity Firm: Summation Capital
NonProfit News, Colin Rajala
Thursday, March 7th 2024
Roger Vincent recently left his role as senior investment officer at Cornell University to launch his own firm, he confirmed. Vincent left the institution in Feb. 29 to launch private equity firm Summation Capital, where he serves as ceo and cio, to provide “institutional quality” products that allow exposure to the asset class, “primarily through fund investing,” he said.
The firm will help institutional investors that lack the internal capacity to invest in private equity on their own, including nonprofit clients, Vincent said. The offices will be in midtown New York City, and “we’ll expand as we launch and grow,” Vincent said, noting more details about the firm will emerge in the coming months.
The firm’s title was inspired by the mathematic sign for “summation,” which “speaks to the key nature of what we are do, a sum of all the hard things put into one and shouldered by the manager and not the asset owners,” he noted. “At Cornell, I enjoyed working for a mission-based institution, and I hope we would find clients in nonprofit segment. And what I hope to achieve is to provide the quality private equity exposure that we had at Cornell to others, and part of that quality is offering low-cost products in a well-aligned way,” he said.
Vincent spent nearly 12 years in Cornell’s investment office, which is led by CIO Kenneth Miranda. Vincent was responsible for portfolio construction and manager selection for all private equity assets within Cornell’s approximately $10 billion endowment. The university’s media relations declined to comment on Vincent’s departure or its succession plans.
Vincent, alongside Senior Investment Officer Cody Danks Burke, served as interim co-cios following the departure of former CIO A.J. Edwards in March 2016, which led to the appointment of Miranda in the second quarter.
Vincent joined Cornell in 2012 from private equity manager Founders Equity, where he spent eight years as a buyout partner, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also serves as a steering committee member for the Institutional Allocators for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, a consortium of asset owners, primarily endowments and foundations, that seeks to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion within institutional investment teams and portfolios and across the investment management industry.