Viking Cub Divya Nettimi of Avala Global On How She Is Using AI In Her Hedge Fund: Global FundWomen Week Conference

At this point, it might seem challenging to find AI plays in 2026, but one  hedge fund manager with a background in engineering has some ideas of where to look for long and short ideas within the theme.

At the December 11th, 2025 100 Women in Finance conference during Global Fund Women Week, Divya Nettimi, founder and chief investment officer of Avala Global, and Summit Rock Advisors co-founder and Chief Investment Strategist Nancy Donohue sat down together for a closing panel to talk about Nettimi’s career, founding Avala Global, and how Nettimi sees AI.

The origin of Avala Global

Donohue started out by asking Nettimi about the genesis of Avala Global, the most successful women-led hedge fund launch of recent years.

Nettimi started her career at Goldman Sachs’ internal hedge fund, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, spending four years there. Then she attended business school before a seven-year run that brought her to the top at Viking Global, a juggernaut that has stood the test of time.

Today Avala Global oversees $2 billion of equity in a long/ short strategy. The name “Avala” comes from the Latin concepts of flight and bird. Nettimi feels that the name calls in a sense of open skies, exploration, discovery, and spanning the world to uncover opportunities with the potential to take flight.

Also see: 2025 Sohn London Conference: Tudor, Palliser, Saba, Gotham City & Other Top Investors Reveal Best Ideas

Background on Divya Nettimi

Born in India, she grew up mostly in Virginia in a technology-focused home. Both of her parents came from engineering backgrounds, and Nettimi loved taking things apart and putting them back together. From an early age, she loved to explore and got into coding at an early age. She learned a couple of languages that shape how she thinks, a mentality of problem solving, understanding the “engine behind things” and “building things.” Nettimi even took a class on artificial intelligence in high school in the early 2000s, learning the original OG coding language, long before before AI was a buzzword.

“Now AI is a huge topic in the world, but my interest in a lot of these topics started early on,” she told Donohue. “I went on to study engineering at Stanford. I loved the problem-solving nature of it.”