Thalēs is a technology-enabled, high-touch capital-raising firm servicing institutional market participants. Its team comprises practitioners from senior roles in investment management, prime brokerage, capital raising, and technology. Clients include some of the largest and most active institutional investors in alternative investments, as well as managers across public and private markets strategies. Founded in 2012, Thalēs is headquartered in New York with an office in Chicago.
David Modiano Head of Capital Strategies Thalēs Capital Partners
David Modiano leads initiatives to connect institutional investors with alternative investment opportunities at Thalēs. Prior to joining in 2019, he was a Partner and Head of Business Development at Mill Hill Capital. David spent a decade as a senior investment professional at Investcorp and Lyxor Asset Management, where he sourced, seeded, onboarded, and grew early-stage hedge funds. His due diligence experience includes reviewing and evaluating thousands of hedge fund managers, and he has successfully negotiated and closed sixteen hedge fund seed deals.
The Challenge: Streamlining Quantitative Due Diligence for Alternative Investments
Before using Solovis Risk Pro, Thalēs relied on scattered, high-maintenance, and non-collaborative tools to perform quantitative manager due diligence. Processing performance information from multiple sources — hedge fund databases, factsheets, and spreadsheets — maintaining a proprietary risk factors warehouse, and running analysis had become a convoluted process involving too many moving parts.
The Thalēs team needed a platform to streamline quantitative due diligence, analyze managers across strategies within a uniform framework, and gain deeper insights into the risk and return drivers of hedge funds and other alternative investments. Without it, their ability to make timely, informed manager selection decisions was limited.
As placement agents, Thalēs needed a portfolio intelligence platform to identify, evaluate, and monitor managers rigorously, develop compelling narratives rooted in quantitative insights, and interface with sophisticated investors increasingly relying on factor frameworks.
Streamlining Quantitative Evaluation
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"As a firm focused on raising capital, we continuously scour the world in search of orthogonal investment opportunities that have the potential to attract institutional assets. Risk Pro streamlined our quantitative evaluation process, allowing us to do more in less time, evaluate risk and return drivers more accurately, and make decisions with greater confidence. Its intuitive factor-based risk approach saves us from bogging down in python scripts, spreadsheets, and intense manual work." David Modiano, Head of Capital Strategies | Thalēs Capital Partners |
Developing Compelling, Data-Backed Manager Narratives
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"While our primary role as placement agents is to raise capital for Alternative Investment Managers, our journey often starts with recrafting narratives to help our Alternative Investment Manager clients better articulate their value proposition to investors. While pedigree, process, and performance are critical, demonstrating skills and key differentiators through quantitative insights translates to more compelling narratives. Risk Pro greatly enhanced our ability to derive such insights, and often, managers we work with have learned something new about their strategies." David Modiano, Head of Capital Strategies | Thalēs Capital Partners |
Sharing Quantitative Insights with Institutional Investors
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"Finally, we work with investors to understand their mandates and searches, match them with managers who can satisfy their requirements, and streamline their discovery process. Using Risk Pro allows us to speak the factor language many investors are fluent in, leading to more meaningful conversations. Our ability to go beyond the pitch book and to quantitatively answer questions or demonstrate a manager's unique attributes has, in turn, increased our credibility with investors and deepened our access." David Modiano, Head of Capital Strategies | Thalēs Capital Partners |
While the Thalēs team has been involved in capital introduction at various prime brokers for over 40 years, they launched their capital raising business in 2018.
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"We have been fortunate to partner with thought leading investors and innovative managers and have been humbled by the results translating to billions of asset flows over a short time. We aspire to become one of the most active placement agents across alternative investment strategies, partnering with leading alternative investment managers." David Modiano, Head of Capital Strategies | Thalēs Capital Partners |
Thalēs plans to continue refining their approach, developing their platform to attract top capital-raising talent, and creating new ways for managers to transcend traditional LP/GP relationships through knowledge transfers and digital tools.
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"While we respect the traditions of the past, we are firm believers in leveraging technology to augment intelligence. As we continue on our journey, Risk Pro will be a valuable part of our stack." David Modiano, Head of Capital Strategies | Thalēs Capital Partners |
In January 2025, Thalēs was featured in Hedge Fund Alert for their move into private markets, with Risk Pro cited as their preferred tool for evaluating capital for clients.