A team of investment management specialists has launched Galileo Capital Management, an investment management and advisory firm with operations in London and Hong Kong.

Founders Anders Jacobsen and Paul Thompson (pictured) have over 40 years’ combined experience in the investment management sector at firms including Goldman Sachs, Prudential Financial, Bankers Trust and Chase Manhattan Bank.

Galileo Capital Management will launch, manage and raise capital for a range of bespoke alternative asset funds. These planned funds target very under-invested business sectors or are highly innovative improvements of existing investment strategies. They will seek to offer a low correlation to traditional investments.

Thompson says: “We have identified a number of investment strategies in niche areas offering a low correlation to markets that are still significantly untapped. Our expertise in structuring and launching investment funds will enable us to bring these strategies to market quickly and effectively”.

Jacobsen adds: “The future of Galileo will witness niche positioning and effective maximization of opportunity in markets that are quite unexplored to date. Our strategy will pick up in areas which the market has traditionally dropped off its radar screen.”

Galileo Capital Management builds on the principals’ prior fund advisory business by also providing advice on set-up, structuring and capital raising for third-party mutual, venture capital, private equity and hedge funds.

Thompson was most recently managing director of SGI-management in Hong Kong and previously he was the first foreign chief executive of a Chinese asset management operation, applying his international experience and business acumen to build US Prudential’s asset management joint venture in China. Before moving to Prudential, he led the development of the international investment funds business at Goldman Sachs in 1997-2001, based in London.

Since 1999, Jacobsen has been providing investment advisory, capital raising and fund structuring services for venture capital, private equity, mutual funds and hedge funds to clients based in China, continental Europe, the UK and the US, with China-related work representing approximately two thirds of his work. Prior to 1999, Anders worked for over ten years as a principal of Bankers Trust Investment Management in derivatives fund management in London and New York. Previously, he was director of the portfolio strategies group at the Chase Manhattan Bank, London.