Growing up in Cleveland, Ahuja saw firsthand the logistical challenges small businesses face by watching her immigrant parents run a day-care center. That’s one of the things that drew her to Block, owner of the Square payments processing platform.

“I knew the impact that Square could have on small-business owners,” she says. “I knew how much love and sweat and care my parents put into their business every day.”

Since Ahuja joined Block in 2019, the company’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization have more than quadrupled, and the company has bet big on crypto, promising to invest 10% of gross profit from Bitcoin products each month into buying Bitcoin for investment. Block, led by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has also branched out from the Square brand, building out Cash App (consumer-facing payments), TBD (focused on decentralized technologies) and Spiral (a Bitcoin business).

Ahuja, 44, says those ventures aren’t hindering earnings growth. Proving the point, Block recently raised its annual profit forecast. “Our scale now means that we can put more effort back into innovation and experimentation,” says Ahuja, who kicked off a career in finance at Morgan Stanley before moving to Walt Disney Co. and Activision Blizzard Inc.

“When our customers do well—whether it’s small businesses through Square or individuals through Cash App—our business does well,” she says. “We’re able to reinvest, we’re able to do more things, launch more products, expand our surface area across geographies or customer types, and that’s a very special thing.”

Ahuja even harbors her own entrepreneurial dream: If she weren’t Dorsey’s financial czar, she says she’d own a bakery most famous for her pistachio cake—using Square to power her small business, of course.

While much of the world was still in pandemic lockdown, Adomait was building the world’s biggest global energy transition fund, working alongside Mark Carney, head of transition investing (and chair of Bloomberg, parent of Bloomberg Businessweek), and Connor Teskey, the CEO of Brookfield’s renewables business.

She helped raise $15 billion to invest in wind and solar energy, battery storage, carbon capture and nuclear power in a bet that countries pledging to achieve net-zero emissions will drive greater demand for renewable energy sources. Transition investing is one of Brookfield’s fastest-growing businesses and is expected to become among the largest in the next few years.

Adomait, 34, started her career in renewable energy when she joined Brookfield’s offices in Toronto in 2011, right after graduating from Carleton University. Three years later she moved to London, where she led due diligence for Brookfield’s $680 million acquisition of Bord Gáis Éireann’s wind portfolio. That transaction marked Brookfield’s entry into the renewables business in Europe.

During a nearly five-year stint at Brookfield’s real estate business in Europe, Adomait managed investments in the portfolio, including the holiday resort group Center Parcs and Student Roost, a UK student housing business that was later sold to GIC Pte and Greystar Real Estate Partners. She returned to the renewables group in 2021 to focus on investments that support progress toward net-zero. She’s now raising money for a second fund and looking to establish the asset class as a key part of investors’ portfolios.

Cohen is a driving force behind Goldman Sachs’ $5.2 billion fund dedicated to investing in private companies. At a time when rivals are reeling from a two-year bust in the tech industry, the fund has been able to purchase stakes in some of the world’s most valuable private companies, including Stripe Inc. and Canva Inc.

Cohen, 49, says markets have recalibrated so that investment valuations for private companies are more aligned with those of their public peers. Whether that’s because employees are itching to cash in on stakes or earlier-stage investors need the liquidity following the private market’s rout, this moment is perfect for what the fund is looking to do, he says: “It’s a pretty compelling time to look at late-stage growth.”

Late-stage growth companies are interested in the “right capital to set themselves up long term,” meaning they’ve become more selective about the investors they partner with and in some cases willing to accept lower valuations, according to Cohen. He calls this a new phase of growth investing. “I don’t think it’s a one-off,” he says.

The fund is well-advanced in doing due diligence on about half a dozen potential investments, says Cohen. And while the fund’s target investment lies somewhere between $20 million and $200 million, it can write checks for well above that. Given Goldman’s breadth of offerings across areas such as wealth management, it can “essentially raise as much as $1 billion for the right marquee asset,” says Cohen, who’s spent most of his career at Goldman in roles spanning both public and private markets.

With plenty of cash and a target of deploying on average about a $1 billion a year, the fund, Cohen says, is on pace to have invested three-quarters of its war chest by the end of 2024.

Gaonkar is a force within the largely White, male-dominated hedge fund industry. Her SurgoCap Partners raised $1.8 billion when it was started in January 2023, making it the largest female-led hedge fund debut in history. Before that Gaonkar spent more than two decades at stock-picking giant Lone Pine Capital, where she was one of a trio overseeing the firm’s investments.

SurgoCap (surgo is Latin for “to rise”), which wagers on and against stocks and can invest in private companies, gained about 20% in its first year of trading, and assets have swelled to $2.7 billion. The fund uses data science to invest around technology-enhancing businesses in sectors including financials, industrials and health care. It’s a concept mirrored in Gaonkar’s philanthropic work. Surgo Foundation, a think tank she co-founded in 2015, focuses on how artificial intelligence and behavioral science can help solve global health problems. Her nonprofit, Surgo Ventures, also does public health research and arranges strategic partnerships.

Gaonkar, 54, was born in Missouri but grew up mostly in Bengaluru, India. After graduating from Harvard University, she had aspirations of becoming a World Bank economist—and worked with the bank’s Earth Institute in Russia and Mongolia—before she switched to investing, appreciating the results-oriented focus of hedge funds, she said in a 2022 interview. In 1998 she joined Stephen Mandel as he was launching Lone Pine and became a portfolio manager. The firm grew to become one of the industry’s largest equity hedge funds. She left in 2022 to start SurgoCap.

Gaonkar is fascinated with neuroscience and how perception and cognition shape one’s reality. She wrote a play with musician David Byrne called Theater of the Mind, which explores those concepts and how senses can be deceiving. Her short story, The New Maid, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which celebrates poetry and short fiction.

Grewal is a key player in Apollo’s push under CEO Marc Rowan to make private credit an asset class in the portfolio of every investor, from individuals to the biggest sovereign wealth funds. She’s responsible for working with Apollo’s largest institutional relationships in the credit business and is involved in developing products and strategies to sell to both institutional investors and through the firm’s burgeoning wealth management business.

Grewal, 35, started her career in hedge funds at Credit Suisse and was hired at Apollo in 2016 to work on business development for a hedge fund managed by John Zito, the firm’s deputy chief investment officer of credit. Promoted to partner in early 2023, Grewal travels the globe pitching investors on the merits of converting a portion of their traditional investments to private credit, which some perceive as riskier than publicly traded debt.

“Take some portion of that and go a little bit less liquid and you can massively outperform,” Grewal says. Private investment-grade credit, which Apollo sees making up the majority of a $40 trillion opportunity, isn’t always well understood, she says: “It’s something that we’re going to have to continue to educate investors on.”

Many institutional investors don’t have a “bucket” in their portfolio to put some of the more customized private, investment-grade credit investments that Apollo has become known for, such as a preferred equity financing that the firm provided to Anheuser-Busch InBev SA. At a time when higher interest rates have made plain-vanilla public bonds more attractive, some investors may wonder why they need private credit at all. But Grewal, who manages a global team of more than 25 people, says Apollo is ramping up its partnerships with Middle East and Asia sovereign wealth funds and is seeing interest from traditional US pension fund investors. Institutional investors are increasingly focused on relationships where they can get better returns and more interesting investment opportunities, she says.

When Killeen founded venture capital firm Stillmark five years ago, the cryptocurrency landscape was completely different from what it is now. Spot-Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, which allow investors to invest in the crypto coin without the risks of having to take possession of it, were a mere fantasy, and the cryptocurrency was just breaking out of a bear market. A self-proclaimed industry pioneer, Killeen saw an opportunity. She started Stillmark as a unique firm that could offer both institutional venture capital knowledge and expertise in Bitcoin technologies.

“We’re immersed not just in the market and conversations with entrepreneurs, but also with open-source developers and researchers that are studying the tech that we’re studying ourselves too,” Killeen says. Before leading Stillmark, she served on the investment teams of venture capital firms Clearstone Ventures Partners and March Capital Partners, focusing on data science, cloud networking and cybersecurity technologies.

The firm prides itself in its ability to do more than provide money: It offers guidance to founders and engages with their corporate boards to help target growth opportunities. An early investment, Lightning Labs Inc, has gone on to raise multiple subsequent rounds of financing—most recently from Valor Equity Partners—since Stillmark backed the company in 2019. Lightning Labs develops software that powers Bitcoin’s payment network, the Lightning Network. Among Stillmark’s other investments are Bitcoin storage firm Casa and energy finance company Satoshi Energy.

“We’re excited to see entrepreneurs, including and especially those in Stillmark’s portfolio, get technology and products into the hands of their user bases in a way that has real impact,” she says. “Real-world use cases for individuals and business adoption of these technologies is what’s most important and what we’re most excited about.”

At 35, Laster is one of the youngest fund managers to go it alone after spending the better part of a decade at Soros Fund Management LLC. With an investment team of five employees, Laster’s Lykos Global Management is raising an inaugural fund at $1 billion.

Lykos already made its mark by participating in a funding round for AI cloud provider CoreWeave Inc. in May alongside more established industry players including Coatue Management, Magnetar Capital and Altimeter Capital Management. With Lykos, Laster says he’s expanding on the strategy he helped develop at Soros of investing in late-stage private companies and initial public offerings. “You can think of Lykos as an evolution of the thought process,” he says. In addition to investing in still-private companies such as CoreWeave and IPOs, Lykos will consider newly public companies as well.

The broadened approach lets Lykos “partner with corporates over their life cycle,” Laster says. “We’re never forced structural sellers, and I think that sort of profile is attractive for companies” that are transitioning to the public markets.

Laster sees plenty of opportunities to put cash to work. He references research that says about half of US venture capital-backed startups have less than a year in cash runway remaining. “It’s a phenomenal environment for us, particularly given how wide the aperture is,” he says.

For Laster, part of Lykos’ pitch is its expertise when it comes to capital markets and the ability to help companies better tell their story in a way that resonates with investors. “Plenty of people can write checks. Capital is something of a commodity,” he says. “What are you going to bring to bear that is going to add value to this team?”

Spence didn’t follow a typical path to becoming the top executive of a US lender with more than $200 billion in assets, much less the youngest CEO of an S&P 500 bank. Spence, 45, was an English literature major at Colgate University before he started out working at growth-stage advertising tech firms before joining Oliver Wyman as a consultant in New York to advise financial-services companies. “People hire consultants to do work that’s large and that doesn’t recur, and the byproduct of that is you get to build experience in dog years,” he says.

He came to Fifth Third Bancorp as its chief strategy officer in 2015, was named president in 2020 and took on the CEO role in 2022, before the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which led some customers to pull deposits at other midsize institutions in favor of larger banks. Spence was able to navigate the industry fallout and grow the bank’s deposits last year.

Spence’s task is to steer a 165-year-old Midwest bank into the digital age. He thinks of a checking account, instead of just having various rote characteristics and requirements, as a membership to the bank’s product development. For example, new software has allowed Fifth Third to deliver paychecks to customers faster and reduce operations costs. The industry’s challenges last year “made for a pretty good litmus test of how we were doing,” he says. Fifth Third maintained its top-tier return on equity and was one of the better-performing stocks in the sector.

Spence sees the next decade bringing comprehensive change to banking, given the shifting global economy, efforts to change regulation and, of course, the emergence of AI. “If we play our cards right, in the next 10 years we’re going be able to build a bank that doesn’t just navigate and survive all of these changes, but has the ability to lead,” he says.

For Stewart, investing and improving lives go hand in hand. In addition to his work with corporate clients in McKinsey & Co.’s private equity practice, he leads research at the McKinsey Institute for Black Economic Mobility, a think tank that seeks to help leaders in the public and private sectors take action to advance racial equity. Through his work, Stewart aims to re-center conversations about DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—around the macroeconomic impact of helping underserved communities.

“I truly believe that we can make our capitalist system work better for more people,” he says. “If we want to create an economic context where more people can thrive, we need growth. That’s just Economics 101.”

Prior to joining McKinsey, Stewart, 39, worked in global markets at JPMorgan Chase & Co., focused on nonprofit debt financing, before co-founding Dreadnought Capital Management, an investment firm dedicated to impact investing. Last year the White House awarded the firm the Vista Prize for Public Leadership, recognizing its work on the disproportionately positive effect that Historically Black Colleges and Universities have on Black economic mobility.

His latest research is aimed at designing affordable housing programs that foster cross-economic collaboration and promote mobility. Private capital players have an important role, he says.

“My hope is that we can move past some of the politics and knee-jerk reactions to acronyms and focus more on the individual humans that need help,” Stewart says of diversity and sustainable investing labels. “That all adds up to better outcomes for society.”

Earlier this year, while many analysts prevaricated about where equities would go as recession fears faded and the S&P 500 rose faster than expected, Subramanian made a bold call, predicting the S&P 500 would hit 5400 by yearend, one of the most bullish forecasts on Wall Street.

But it’s not just getting ahead of the consensus that makes her stand out—it’s her understanding that staying invested is what tends to make the difference in returns. As she put it in a May research report, “‘Time in the market beats timing the market’ is an old but prescient adage.”

Her positive outlook is nuanced. She sees danger in the illiquid and unmarked assets held by funds that invest in private markets. Retirees may not even know that pensions are increasingly backed by financial assets that don’t trade on exchanges and can differ wildly in value from how they’re accounted for in their companies’ ledger.

Her understanding of the long-term benefits of being fully invested, combined with awareness of the perils of being overly exposed to untested investment strategies, has made her a ranked analyst in the Institutional Investor survey every year for more than a decade. She’s been with the quantitative team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch since 2001.

As for her big call right now, Subramanian, 51, said in April that large-cap equities are reasonably valued and have more room to grow. And she sees today, with its promise of growth after an interest-rate tightening cycle, as a world more akin to the mid-1990s than to something like the dot-com peak in 2000.