Lee Thomas Kranefuss (born September 27, 1961) is an American businessman, investment manager, corporate adviser, and entrepreneur.
Kranefuss started and ran the iShares series of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for Barclays Global Investors (BGI), the asset management arm of Britain's Barclays Bank. BGI was acquired by BlackRock in December 2009. Kranefuss saw the opportunity to commercialize and grow the extant but immaterial ETF industry that had developed by the time iShares was launched in 2000, and is credited with driving ETFs from a novelty product to a mainstream investment choice through aggressive education and promotion of the iShares line. By the end of 2009, global ETF assets exceeded a trillion dollars globally, with nearly half the total in the iShares funds.In 2012, Kranefuss associated with private equity firm Warburg Pincus. Subsequently, in 2014, acquiring over 50% of Source ETFs, a leading European ETF provider. The firm was successfully sold to Invesco in 2017In 2016, Kranefuss and associates Vinay Nair and Bruce Lavine (former head of iShares Europe and then COO and President of Wisdom Tree) announced the formation of 55 Capital Partners. Kranefuss has since left his daily and strategic oversight roles with that firm.
In mid-2017, Kranefuss announced he was working on a disruptive web-based application to enable better investment planning. The software is aimed at both individual investors as well as professional advisors. His intent is to build a very intuitive and experiential tools for investment planning, leveraging current machine-learning, classification, and other techniques.