Rand Araskog joins from Permira and Eric Ghernati transitions from within J.P. Morgan as the firm expands its venture and growth equity platform.
J.P. Morgan Private Capital has added two new partners as the firm looks to build out its venture and growth equity investment platform, citing a structural shift in how and where capital markets operate.
Rand Araskog joins as a partner from Permira, the global private equity firm, where he was a managing director and helped construct the strategy, staffing, and systems for a $4 billion growth fund. Before Permira, he worked as a long-short and growth equity analyst at Coatue, covering enterprise software, hardware, and frontier technologies. He began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and holds a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Eric Ghernati comes from within J.P. Morgan Asset Management, where he has worked since 2020. His most recent role was in the firm’s U.S. Equity Group, where he covered technology strategies across all market capitalizations, including the Mid Cap Growth and Small Cap Growth funds. He was also a co-portfolio manager for the J.P. Morgan U.S. Tech Leaders Strategy and its active ETF vehicle, JTEK, as well as the U.S. Equity Focus fund.
Ghernati also oversaw the group’s pre-IPO and private market investments. Before J.P. Morgan, he spent six years at Lord Abbett covering the technology sector and 15 years earlier in his career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a research analyst. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from San Francisco State University.
Why J.P. Morgan is expanding now
The timing of the two hires reflects a longer-running shift in where growth companies choose to raise capital and how long they stay out of public markets. The median age of a U.S. technology company at the time of its initial public offering has nearly tripled over the past 25 years, from five years in 1999 to 14 years in 2024. Over that same period, global private market assets have expanded from roughly $1 trillion to approximately $20 trillion. There are now more than 800 private technology companies valued above $1 billion, with aggregate value approaching $4 trillion.
That environment has created significant demand from institutional and high-net-worth clients who want exposure to high-growth companies before they ever reach public exchanges. J.P. Morgan Private Capital is positioned to serve that demand through its venture and growth equity platform, and the addition of Araskog and Ghernati is intended to expand the team’s capacity to source and manage those investments across a wider range of company stages and sectors.
The firm manages $4.2 trillion in assets under management across its broader asset management division, giving it substantial infrastructure and client relationships to support a growing private markets operation.
The convergence of public and private equity has been one of the more consequential developments in institutional investing over the past decade, driven in part by the length of time companies now spend outside of public markets and in part by a growing client appetite for diversification beyond traditional stock and bond portfolios. Both Araskog and Ghernati bring experience across that boundary, having covered both public and private technology investments throughout their careers.
J.P. Morgan Private Capital said the expansion reflects its intent to continue scaling the platform and to build strategies across the full growth investing continuum, from early-stage venture through later-stage growth equity.