He is not yet 40, but already counts among the seasoned investment managers operating at the highest levels of global business. With nearly two decades of experience behind him, Michael Kollar has overseen transactions worth more than €12 billion across multiple continents.

Born in Slovakia, educated in the United States where he lived for a decade, and now a British citizen, Kollar has recently settled with his family in Prague. His professional life was tied for 17 years to Macquarie, the Australian investment bank that ranks among the world’s largest private capital managers, overseeing assets of roughly €600 billion. Macquarie, well known in the Czech Republic thanks to several large deals, served as his professional home until earlier this year.

Now, he has struck out on his own. Since spring, Kollar has been building GateVest, an investment platform launched in partnership with J&T.

“In the corporate world, you become dulled over time. I always wanted to build something of my own. I’m turning 40 this year, and I knew that ten years from now I probably wouldn’t have the courage to take the leap,” Kollar said of his new chapter.

The Desire to Settle Down and Build a Firm

Seventeen years with a single institution—despite the variety of roles—left him seeking change, no longer eager to live the restless life of a global dealmaker. His first five years at Macquarie were spent on Wall Street in New York, before transfers to London and later Munich.

“I could have returned to New York to rejoin my old team. But I had no motivation left. Over the past twenty years I moved twenty times. That was enough. We like it in Prague, we have two small children, and we want to finally settle down,” he explained.

At the same time, he wanted to deploy his own capital into Western private equity funds. “It was ironic. I spent twenty years on private markets but had none of my own money invested there. I could have invested in Macquarie funds, but that felt like putting too many eggs in one basket. When I started looking at how to access private equity funds, I discovered it was nearly impossible to build a diversified portfolio of top managers without at least €20 million,” Kollar recalled.

“We started exploring ways to access these funds on more reasonable terms. At first, I spoke with colleagues, family, and friends. But quickly it snowballed, and it became clear this could evolve into a larger platform available to others as well,” he said.

The idea is simple: help smaller investors access established private equity funds that consistently generate returns between 15% and 20%—vehicles typically closed to individuals.

“Local investors shouldn’t limit themselves to local managers. What are the odds that someone in Prague can consistently outperform funds from New York or London? My approach is: let’s invest alongside those who have beaten the market reliably for decades. The platform where I spent my career has been around for more than thirty years, and over that time it generated nearly 15% average annual returns,” Kollar said.

A Fund of Funds, But Different

“You can already access KKR, Apollo, or Blackstone with as little as $10,000, which is why I don’t see much added value in funds targeting only the largest managers. I’m focused on smaller, higher-performing funds—often specialized in fields like healthcare, education, or software—where such access doesn’t exist,” he explained.

What he is seeking, he says, are the KKR or Blackstone equivalents of twenty years ago—funds still intent on building performance track records and reputations rather than merely amassing assets to collect management fees.

“With other funds, you pay a fee for a service. With GateVest, you invest alongside the manager. I see it more as an investment club, a consortium, where we and our investors are in the same boat. I’m personally committing €1 million,” he said. “My capital will sit in a so-called first-loss position, taking losses ahead of other investors. There will be no management fee, and performance fees will only begin once we generate 10% annual returns. If we don’t, I earn nothing. It’s aggressive, but I believe in the strategy,” he added, noting that he has already identified a list of target funds.

“We don’t focus on today’s macro headlines. I don’t care what Trump says or does. Ten years from now, the world will look completely different,” he said, emphasizing that the fund targets long-term positions with the best managers, whether in Europe or the U.S. His medium-term ambition is to build the platform into the low hundreds of millions of euros—a level, he says, that unlocks access, fee discounts, and the chance to co-invest in deals at zero cost.

Allies at J&T

GateVest’s launch is being accelerated by a partnership with J&T Finance Group, which has invested a double-digit million-euro sum in the fund and entered into an exclusive collaboration to bring this strategy to its clients in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. J&T is also launching its own J&T Global Private Equity Fund, which will serve as GateVest’s partner.

J&T will provide local client access and capital. Kollar will focus on defining the investment strategy and leveraging his deep ties to Western markets. The vehicle will be structured as a fund for qualified investors, with a minimum ticket of €100,000.

This is not Kollar’s first encounter with J&T. In 2017, when Macquarie bought a 31% stake in EPIF, the infrastructure arm of Daniel Křetínský’s EPH, Kollar was part of the team working on the acquisition of regulated energy assets, including gas and power distribution and heating networks. At that time, J&T was a shareholder in EPH.

There is also a family connection: his father, Slovak economist and veteran banker Jozef Kollar, serves on the supervisory board of J&T Finance Group. A former head of Volksbank Slovakia and politician with Richard Sulík’s Freedom and Solidarity party, he strongly influenced his son’s path into global finance. But, as Kollar insists, his father had no role in the new fund’s creation. “I went through the front door. From the start I was negotiating directly with J&T’s investment company like any outsider. My father didn’t pave the way for me. He told me himself: either they’ll be interested, or they won’t—but you must earn it on your own,” he said.

By age 12, thanks to his father, he already knew he wanted to work on Wall Street. That ambition was fulfilled early.

Deals Worth €12 Billion

At 22, he began on Wall Street as an investment banker at Macquarie, advising institutional clients on M&A and helping invest the bank’s own capital.

After moving to London, he specialized in private equity investments in real estate and infrastructure, fund management, and acquisitions of investment platforms. More recently, in Munich, he served as global head of business development for the real estate division, while also managing two private equity funds with assets exceeding €1.3 billion.

“It was more luck than design that I got exposure to so many areas and divisions at Macquarie. We were new on Wall Street back then, learning to compete with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan before finding our own way. After moving to Europe, I began running funds and got involved in large acquisitions across Central and Eastern Europe,” he recalled.

He worked on major transactions totaling €12 billion. Beyond EPIF, he was involved in several landmark regional deals: the acquisition and later sale of České Radiokomunikace and its Slovak counterpart Towercom, the sale of Polish Amazon logistics hubs, the purchase of a Czech-Slovak logistics portfolio from developer HB Reavis, and another pan-European logistics portfolio worth €600 million.

“I advised investors, bought and sold fund assets, managed funds, launched new ones, acquired platforms. I had to learn how they operate, how portfolios are built, how strategies are formed. All of that flows directly into what I’m building now with GateVest,” Kollar said.

The original Czech-language article is available in Hospodářské Noviny by clicking HERE.