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.
Senior Advisory Board
Anna is corporate development director and executive committee member, overseeing the M&A activities of the Phoenix Group, UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business and a FTSE 100 company (UK’s 100 largest listed companies). Anna has previously spent 15 years with JPMorgan, where she was a managing director in the M&A investment banking division. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master of science from the London School of Economics.
With 27 years of capital markets experience, Tricia is a managing partner and Chief Operating Officer of Accord Group, a capital advisory specialist with a $15 billion track record of completed transactions since 2013. Earlier in her career, she worked as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and served as a consultant to the World Bank in Beijing. Tricia holds an MBA from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley.
With 30 years of real estate investment experience, Dana is currently a senior managing director and the Chief Operating Officer of Macquarie Asset Management’s real estate division. Previously, Dana was the Head of Europe of Macquarie real estate division, the Chief Investment Officer of Generali Land Lease (GLL) and a managing director at Menard Doswell & Co. He holds a bachelor degree from Middlebury College.
Richard spent 20 years at Macquarie Asset Management working in New York, London and Sydney in a variety of senior investment roles. Richard has extensive experience in real asset private equity, including how private equity can be accessed by wealth customers. Earlier in his career, he held roles at ABN AMRO and Roland Berger, where he worked as a strategy consultant. Richard holds a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Oxford.
Peter is a Partner and Deputy Chief Investment Officer at Fifth Wall where he co-leads the climate technology investment team. Previously he was a Managing Director at Presidio Partners, a consultant to Silver Lake, and also held various roles at Warburg Pincus, Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund and JPMorgan. Peter holds a bachelor’s degree from UNC – North Carolina and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most recently, Christoph focused on the secondary private equity transactions at Investec. Prior to Investec, he specialized secondary private equity at HarbourVest, one of the world’s leading secondaries investors and a prominent limited partner with nearly $150 billion in assets under management. He also held positions in investment banking at Raymond James and William Blair. Christoph holds a master’s degree from IE Business School and Cass Business School.
- Includes realised and unrealised deals directly managed by Michael Kollar at prior firms.