In Good Company• Feb 6, 2026• 42:42Interview

Mala Gaonkar - SurgoCap Partners की Founder | पॉडकास्ट | In Good Company | (Hindi version)

From In Good Company

Mala Gaonkar•Founder, SurgoCap Partners

Executive Summary

Mala Gaonkar, founder of SurgoCap Partners, outlines her investment philosophy focused on the intersection of technology and non-tech industries.
SurgoCap concentrates on four verticals: enterprise data, financial services, healthcare services, and industrial technologies, seeking quality businesses with high incremental ROIC.
Gaonkar believes the real economic value in AI will be captured in the inference layer and by companies with proprietary, real-time data, rather than just in model training.
The firm maintains a small, collaborative team structure, believing smaller organizations are more effective at generating cross-disciplinary insights and de-biasing decision-making.

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Concerns Raised

Execution risk in capital-intensive technology sectors
The difficulty of timing short positions against market structure and factor rotations
The pervasive influence of narrative and emotional bias in investment decisions

Opportunities Identified

Tech-driven disruption in traditional, non-tech industries like healthcare and industrials
Companies with high incremental ROIC and significant reinvestment opportunities
The AI inference layer and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs)
Businesses that own proprietary, real-time data and have embedded user workflows

Key Themes

The Intersection of Technology and Traditional Industries

Gaonkar's core thesis is that every company is becoming a technology company. SurgoCap seeks value by analyzing how technology is disrupting and enabling established businesses in sectors like healthcare, finance, and industrials.

This approach uncovers investment opportunities in non-obvious places, moving beyond pure-play tech to find durable, tech-enabled market leaders in traditional sectors.

Defining and Identifying 'Quality' Businesses

A quality business is defined by a high incremental Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) and the ability to reinvest significant capital at those high rates. This focus on the marginal return, rather than the average, is a key screener for long-term compounders.

This provides a disciplined framework for identifying businesses with durable competitive advantages and strong value-creation potential over a 3-5 year horizon.

Capturing Value in the AI Stack

The discussion moves beyond the hype of AI model training to focus on where sustainable economic value will be created. Gaonkar points to the inference layer (the application of models) and companies with proprietary, real-time data sets as key areas of opportunity.

This offers a nuanced perspective for investors, suggesting that the most defensible and profitable AI-related investments may be in application-specific hardware and data providers with embedded workflows.

The Future of Investment Management

Gaonkar advocates for smaller, more focused investment organizations. She argues that human collaboration and idea generation are most effective in small teams, allowing for better synthesis of information across industry boundaries and a more systematic, de-biased process.

This challenges the 'bigger is better' model in asset management, suggesting that a focused, lean structure can be a competitive advantage in a complex market.

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Topics

Investment Management Hedge Funds SurgoCap Partners Mala Gaonkar Lone Pine Capital Technology Investing Artificial Intelligence (AI)AI Inference Return on Invested Capital (ROIC)Investment Thesis Portfolio Concentration Data-Driven Investing Behavioral Bias Robotic Surgery Enterprise Data Financial Services Healthcare Services

Processed Apr 10, 2026 yt-dlp + mlx-whisper + Gemini