Kristofer C. Madu is an American private equity investor. Madu is an investor at TPG Inc., where he focuses on technology investments. He is also the founder of First Friday's Group, a technology company.
Madu was born in Nashville, Tennessee to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father. He spent much of his childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, before returning to the United States for secondary schooling.
Madu attended Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts, and later a Master's in International Economics from Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Madu began his career at Morgan Stanley in the Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) practice, where he worked on transactions including Novo Holdings' $16.5 billion acquisition of Catalent, AbbVie's $10.1 billion acquisition of ImmunoGen, and Uber's $2.25 billion acquisition of Transplace.
Madu then joined TPG Inc. as a private equity investor focusing on technology investments. At TPG, he worked on TPG's $7.6 billion acquisition of DirecTV from AT&T.
In January 2026, Madu was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Finance category.
In 2018, Madu founded technology company First Friday's Group. The company partnered with Red Bull on a series of events, and was selected to represent the United States at the Red Bull Basement Global Workshop in Toronto, Canada in 2019.
Prior to finance, Madu began his career as a recording artist. Under the stage name Travis Karter, Madu released multiple albums and singles. His debut music video featured an appearance from Ky-Mani Marley and was distributed on national television in Jamaica.
In 2015, Madu founded Water Is The Answer, a nonprofit organization that funded the construction of wells and boreholes to provide clean drinking water in communities across Nigeria. The organization was funded primarily through proceeds from his music career and merchandise.
In 2025, Madu founded When We Grow Up, a nonprofit that partners with underfunded schools to provide youth from lower-income backgrounds with mentorship and resources to access careers in medicine, law, finance, and technology.