A onetime Institutional Investor hedge fund rising star has rapidly turned into a rising activist.
Since Adam Katz formed Irenic Capital Management with Andy Dodge in 2021, the firm has engaged in a flurry of public activist campaigns in just the past year or so.
Irenic has yet to earn the kind of name recognition enjoyed by other activists such as Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management, Jeffrey Smith of Starboard Value, and Paul Singer of Elliott Management. But it is starting to be taken seriously on both sides of the Atlantic. Investors have certainly noticed.
Since the firm launched with $335 million, assets under management have swelled to $1.4 billion, according to an investor. This includes about a half-dozen co-investment vehicles for investors to participate in specific deals. A big chunk of these assets is new capital, and not attributable to a rise in performance.
Irenic’s hedge fund, launched in August 2022, was up 14 percent in 2023, its first full year, and 19 percent in 2024, the investor says. In the first two months of this year, it rose less than 2 percent, better than the broad market. The fund has little correlation to the overall market, with a beta of just 0.2, or a 20 percent overlap with the S&P 500’s movement.
To underscore this lack of correlation, in the 29 months from the fund’s launch through December 2024, the Russell 2000 — an index of small-cap stocks — has suffered 16 down months and dropped a total of 68 percent. Irenic was up 8.4 percent over the same period, per the investor.
Katz graduated from Harvard in 2007 and co-launched a woman’s e-commerce company, FabFitFun, that was subsequently backed by Kleiner Perkins, NEA, and Upfront Ventures. He returned to Harvard and earned an MBA from the business school and a JD from the law school while continuing to run the business through 2011. After passing the bar, Katz joined Elliott Management’s situational investing group, a catchall group that included everything from special situations to sovereign credit and private equity, as well as activism and distressed. In 2023, he was named one of ten II Hedge Fund Rising Stars.
Irenic had its first foray into activism just two months after the 2022 launch, when it opposed the Murdoch family and News Corp’s reported plan to recombine with Fox Corp., which was ultimately scrapped.
More recently, Irenic has built a stake of slightly less than 30 percent of U.K.-based FD Technologies. In the U.K., if investors own 30 percent or more of a company, they are required to make a tender offer for the rest of the shares. But a year ago, the company split into three different businesses and recently sold its consulting business. It plans to remain just a software company.
Also in 2024, Irenic nominated Katz and another individual to the board of directors of the Barnes Group, which is in the industrial and aerospace businesses. Two months later, the company named Katz to the board and entered into a cooperation agreement with the hedge fund firm. Later in the year, Apollo Funds agreed to purchase Barnes in an all-cash transaction valued at $47.50 per share, a deal that was completed in January 2025. On the heels of the third-quarter 2023 earnings reports, with the fund’s cost basis in the mid-20s, Irenic had bought share as low as $19.20 apiece.
In another activist engagement, The Wall Street Journal reported early last year that Irenic had built a stake of nearly 5 percent in Forward Air and sent a letter to directors urging it to engage in a strategic review, including possibly selling the company. Forward Air later said it had hired two investment banks, and in January 2025 its board initiated a strategic review, which potentially includes selling the company or entering a merger agreement, according to a company press release.
