Most of the funds’ asset gains were fueled by new capital rather than performance gains, the people said. Spokesmen at the firms declined to comment.

Pine River China Fund returned 30 percent in 2014, Guard gained about 10 percent in its first five months and BosValen returned just under 3 percent in the two months it traded last year. The other funds’ performances could not be confirmed. The Eurekahedge Hedge Fund Index, tracking managers globally, returned 4.4 percent last year.

Asian hedge-fund assets were slow to rebound after the plunge during the 2008 global financial crisis. While worldwide hedge-fund assets eclipsed the 2007 peak in 2010, it took the Asian pool three more years to do so, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research Inc.

Only a few Asia-based startups have accumulated $1 billion or more since the 2008 crisis, including former Highbridge Capital Management Asia head Carl Huttenlocher’s Myriad Asset Management and Tybourne Capital Management (HK), led by Eashwar Krishnan, who earlier worked for Lone Pine Capital. The average Asian hedge fund oversaw $117 million at last year’s end, according to Eurekahedge.

Managers’ Pedigree

“A lot of the larger established managers were closed to new money, so inflows of capital were going into newer managers looking to scale or new launches,” said Shane Bolton, Hong Kong-based head of Asia prime brokerage at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The difference with 2013’s startups “was consistency of pedigree and that a majority already had strategic capital, enabling them to reach critical mass at launch.”

BFAM is staffed by a former Nomura team of traders led by Benjamin Fuchs that traces its roots to an Asia-based internal fund started by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2007. It started with Nomura support. Oryza’s Hideki Kinuhata and Ryan Thall traded for the global fund of Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, set up to allow clients to invest with some of the New York-based bank’s top proprietary traders.

Leland Lim, Guard’s chief investment officer, was previously co-head of Goldman Sachs’s macro trading team in the Asia-Pacific region outside Japan. BosValen CIO Ken Xu helped manage money at both Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC and billionaire Steven A Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors. Pleiad co- founders Kenneth Lee and Michael Yoshino are alumni of Soros Fund Management and backed by Hong Kong-based HS Group in starting their own firm.

‘Alpha Market’

The regional industry has long been considered a far-flung fringe market by global institutions that have increasingly dominated hedge-fund inflows since the crisis. Credit Suisse statistics show it takes about 10 months to a year between the first conversation an Asian hedge fund has with a potential investor and the actual capital allocation, compared with six to seven months for their U.S. and European peers.