In another sign of how recent US regulations are encouraging bankers to leave their old firms and set up hedge funds, a large proprietary team at Goldman Sachs has started raising cash for a new fund to be launched later this year, the Financial Times said.

The team – led by two senior members of Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategies desk, Daniele Benatoff and Ariel Roskis – has already secured a $300 million investment from one of Europe’s biggest hedge funds, Brummer & Partners, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources.

The launch will mark the final big set of departures from GSPS, which at its peak traded as much as $11 billion of Goldman’s own capital and was one of the bank’s most lucrative operations.

The operation has ceased to be viable as an internal business at Goldman since US regulations, called the Volcker rule, were passed last year. These rules prohibit banks risking their own capital by speculative trading. The legislation was rolled out as part of a series of measures designed, lawmakers said, to prevent a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008. According to Bloomberg, nine Goldman Sachs employees left in October last year to start a unit at private equity firm KKR & Co that will invest in stocks.

The new firm running the hedge fund has been registered with the Financial Services Authority under the name IEL. It will be one of the biggest fund startups of the past two years, a sign of growing confidence in the hedge fund sector, which was battered in 2008.