Sam Hendel is the Managing Partner of Chord Music Partners and Dundee Partners. He founded Chord in 2021, which is a joint venture with Universal Music Group and serves as Universal’s global catalogue acquisition vehicle. Today, Chord is one of the largest independent music rights platforms in the world, with a growing portfolio of over 65,000 works spanning both legacy and contemporary artists, including The Weeknd, Fleetwood Mac, David Guetta, OneRepublic, John Legend, Diplo/Major Lazer, ZZ Top, and Morgan Wallen. The platform combines institutional capital with Universal’s unmatched global infrastructure, giving it unique access to premium deal flow, world-class active management, and long-term alignment with artists and rights holders.

In addition to Chord, Sam and his family have invested in media and cultural enterprises such as Knitting Factory Entertainment, Partisan Records, Colors Studios, Kino Lorber, and many Broadway plays and musicals. He also founded Jukebox in 2022, a platform that allows catalogue owners and artists to democratize music royalties by offering shares of royalty streams as regulated securities to retail investors.

Sam is a Co-Founder of Dataminr, the world’s leading real-time AI company for event and risk detection. He began his career in investment management, serving as a Portfolio Manager specializing in merger arbitrage and event-driven strategies. Sam is an Associate Fellow of Davenport College at Yale and recently joined the Yale Schwarzman Center Advisory Board.