Michael is the founder and CEO of GateVest. He brings nearly two decades of global investment experience across private equity, infrastructure, and real assets, having executed transactions exceeding €12 billion and delivered an average annual return of over 13%¹.

He began his professional career at Macquarie in 2008, one of the world’s largest investment management firms, with nearly €600 billion in assets under management and a 55-year unbroken track record of profitability. Over the course of his career, he developed a deep understanding of private markets and private equity, with a particular focus on risk management and downside protection, which have become central to his investment philosophy.

Michael spent five years on Wall Street in New York advising institutional clients on mergers and acquisitions while co-investing Macquarie’s proprietary capital. He later specialised in real estate and infrastructure private equity in London, where he launched and managed investment funds and sourced and acquired an investment management platform on behalf of Macquarie. Most recently, based in Munich, he served as Global Head of Business Development, where he led the origination, structuring, and launch of new investment strategies while also acting as the sole manager of two private equity funds with €1.3 billion in assets.

His academic background spans across the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (the United States), Mannheim University (Germany), INSEAD (New York, Paris, Singapore and Sydney) and Harvard University. A British citizen originally from Slovakia, Michael left his home country at age 17 to study and live abroad – a decision that set in motion a lifelong pursuit of learning, exploration, and independent thinking.

Despite a successful career in institutional investing, Michael was increasingly driven by a personal vision: to build a platform that would allow him to invest his own capital and that of close friends and family, into the world’s top-performing private market funds. It was the principles of access and alignment on which GateVest was founded.

His mission is simple but ambitious: to make the inaccessible accessible – for himself, and for others.