Harvard has also committed more money to funds already in the portfolio such as health care specialist Deerfield Management, which invests in public and private equities, according to people familiar with the matter.

For Narvekar, who declined to be interviewed through a spokesman, hedge funds have long represented a favored strategy. They still make up a third of assets at Columbia University, where Narvekar worked for 11 years before heading to Harvard.

In the late 1990s, Narvekar led the University of Pennsylvania’s effort to expand its portfolio of hedge funds and other alternative investments. (Hedge funds currently amount to 29 percent of its endowment.)

Narvekar and his team are targeting managers with a variety of styles, such as long-short equity, D1 Capital’s approach. A classic hedge fund strategy, it’s designed for returns that are less correlated with the stock market. Investors balance bets on stocks deemed likely to rise with those expected to fall.

D1 also takes stakes in private companies, which are often available at discounts to public ones. The fund gained 10 percent in the first two months of this year, after returning 5.4 percent last year.

Harvard backed MFN Partners Management, co-founded two years ago by Michael DeMichele, a former partner at Baupost Group, according to a person familiar with the matter. Famed value investor Seth Klarman runs Boston-based Baupost. Value investors bet on beaten-down investments in the hope of a rebound.

One winning wager has been Jeffrey Talpins’s Element Capital Management, which Narvekar backed while running Columbia’s endowment. The New York-based company uses a global macroeconomic strategy: trades based on political and economic trends, rather than the fundamental analysis of individual investments.

The fund surged 17 percent last year while producing annualized gains of 21 percent since launching in 2005. Element paid Talpins $420 million last year, among the most of any hedge fund manager.

Keeping Faith
Harvard still has faith in some of the investors who ran money internally. It seeded some former employees who launched funds after Narvekar trimmed operations. TPRV Capital, for one, specializes in relative value. That approach tries to take advantage of price discrepancies of related securities, such as stocks in the same industry.

As with long-short funds, institutions tend to look to relative value to provide out-performance in tough markets. Initial returns have been subdued, with a 2.6 percent gain last year, a person familiar with the matter said. (None of the hedge funds responded for requests for comment.)