By the time Financial News reported on the firm’s 2013 results, that early bet had compounded into one of the more durable alternative asset managers to come out of London’s post-2000 wave of independent fund launches.

The founding structure was unusual for its moment. Gabay, who had spent the previous decade in equity sales and investment banking at Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse First Boston, built Duet with co-founder Alain Schibl around a strategy-agnostic premise: back individuals with a demonstrated edge, then let the mandate follow the manager rather than forcing every hire into a fixed house strategy. “We’re building out funds based on individuals rather than the strategy itself,” Gabay told Euromoney as the firm expanded, a description that has held up as an accurate summary of how Duet grew for the next two decades.

2002–2003: A Different Kind of Start

Most new hedge fund platforms in the early 2000s launched with a single flagship strategy and scaled that one idea. Duet did the opposite. Starting from that initial $10 million fund, the firm added strategies one manager at a time, eventually building out equity special-situations funds, a global macro fund, a CTA fund and a long-only African tracker fund investing across ten countries. The firm later brought in Osman Semerci, Merrill Lynch’s former global head of fixed income, currencies and commodities, as chief executive, a hire that signaled the platform’s ambitions had outgrown its founding fund.

By 2013, that manager-by-manager approach had scaled into a firm managing more than $5 billion, according to Financial News’s coverage of the year’s results. Duet had, by then, become the controlling shareholder of multiple asset managers spanning the hedge fund and long-only space, private equity and real estate, and wealth management, operating through four subsidiaries regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and a fifth regulated by the DIFC in the UAE.

2003–2012: From Public Markets to Private Equity

The public-markets business was only half the story. In 2003, Duet formalized a private equity arm, and over the following decade Gabay led the firm into direct control positions in operating businesses rather than portfolio stakes alone. The clearest example is Dashen Brewery in Ethiopia, where Duet’s 2012 investment, made alongside UK consumer-goods investor Vasari and Ethiopian endowment fund TIRET Group, was at the time the largest private equity transaction completed in the country. A similar pattern played out in Nigeria, where Duet Private Equity took a majority stake in AJEast Nigeria, maker of the BIG Cola beverage brands, and in Moldova, where the firm acquired the country’s leading electricity distribution business in a €141 million deal serving roughly 900,000 customers.

Each of these deals shared a structural logic: partner with a credible local operator, take real board influence rather than a passive equity stake, and hold the position long enough for the underlying market to catch up to the thesis. Gabay sat on Dashen Brewery’s board from 2012 to 2018. He later chaired the board of Merit Capital, the Antwerp-based wealth and asset manager Duet Private Equity acquired in 2018, a deal that added roughly 2,000 clients and pushed the platform further into fee-based wealth management alongside its hedge fund and private equity lines.

2012–2019: Building Across Multiple Continents

The multi-strategy structure eventually supported offices spanning multiple financial centers, and it produced a run of industry recognition that is unusually broad for a firm of Duet’s size. Duet Africa Fund won the EMG Equity Fund of the Year prize at the 2018 Investors Choice Awards. Duet Mena Fund took the Equity Fund of the Year prize at the 2015 MENA Fund Manager Awards. Duet India Hotels was named Best New Hotel of the Year at HICSA in 2015 for its Hyderabad property, part of a hospitality venture built on a development alliance with IHG to roll out Holiday Inn Express hotels across India that grew to six operational properties with 960 rooms before the platform sold to a conglomerate backed by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund. Dashen Brewery itself picked up two separate private equity industry awards, in 2013 and 2014, before Duet’s Nigerian beverage bet, Big Bottling Company, was named Deal of the Year at the 2019 Private Equity Africa Awards.

That spread, across hedge funds, long-only strategies, private equity and hospitality, is not the typical profile of a firm that started with $10 million and a single fund. Most managers that begin that small either stay narrow or fail to survive a full market cycle. Duet did neither.

Today: What the Record Suggests About Diversification

Henry Gabay‘s own account of the firm’s strategy, that funds should be built around individual managers rather than a fixed house view, offers a partial explanation for why the platform diversified as aggressively as it did rather than doubling down on its original strategy. Each new fund or acquisition brought in a manager or operating team with a specific edge in a specific market: Ethiopian brewing, Nigerian beverage manufacturing, Moldovan utilities, Indian hospitality, European wealth management. The through-line connecting them is not a single asset class but a repeatable process for identifying operators with local knowledge and backing them with institutional capital and governance. It’s a slower way to build a firm than picking one strategy and scaling it, and it shows up in how long each individual bet was held rather than in how quickly the platform grew.

Two decades on, that process has left Duet with a track record that spans four continents and multiple regulatory regimes, built one manager, one deal and one fund at a time from a starting position that most institutional allocators would have considered too small to matter. The firm’s growth from $10 million to a multi-billion-dollar platform is, in that sense, less a story about a single successful bet than about a founding structure that was built to keep making new ones.

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