Investors (LPs)
What is Endowment?
An endowment is a permanent investment fund supporting an institution such as a university or hospital. Endowments are long-horizon limited partners and pioneered heavy allocations to private markets.
An endowment is a pool of donated capital invested to fund an institution’s operations in perpetuity, spending only a portion of returns each year. Their indefinite time horizon makes them natural private-markets investors.
The "endowment model," popularized by large university endowments, allocates heavily to illiquid alternatives — venture, private equity, real assets, and hedge funds — making endowments influential LPs.