If you watch funding bulletins as we do, you will have observed one thing this yr. There are a variety of mega-rounds coming collectively, and Tiger Global is concerned in a notable variety of them, typically because the spherical’s co-lead.
Just this week, half a dozen corporations have introduced rounds that the New York-based investing big has led, co-led, or written follow-on checks into, together with HighRadius, an organization whose $300 million Series C spherical it co-led with D1 Capital; Cityblock Health, whose $192 million in prolonged Series C funding Tiger Global led; and 6sense, which acquired a follow-on verify from Tiger Global as a part of a $125 million Series D spherical. The agency can also be reportedly reportedly in talks to co-lead a $300 million spherical in a five-year-old, AI chipmaker known as Groq.
If you’re questioning the place all that cash is coming from, marvel now not. Though Tiger Global despatched a letter to its buyers again in January, saying it was concentrating on $3.75 billion for its thirteenth enterprise fund (titled XIV, apparently for superstitious causes), a brand new SEC submitting reveals that new fund simply closed with virtually twice that quantity: $6.65 billion.
That’s a variety of billions, even on this market, and particularly for Tiger Global, which closed its 12th fund with $3.75 billion in capital commitments solely final yr.
We’ve reached out to the agency to study extra, however as we famous again in January, after we caught wind of its fundraising plans, Tiger Global seemingly had a powerful case to current potential restricted companions.
In 2020, quite a few of its portfolio corporations both went public or had been acquired, together with Yatsen Holding, the almost five-year-old mum or dad firm of China-based cosmetics big Perfect Diary; the cloud-based information warehousing outfit Snowflake; and Root insurance coverage, a virtually six-year-old, Columbus, Ohio-based insurance coverage firm.
As for M&A, Tiger Global noticed at the very least three of its corporations swallowed by larger tech corporations final yr, together with Postmates’s all-stock sale to Uber for $2.65 billion; Credit Karma’s $7 billion sale in money and inventory to Intuit; and the sale of Kustomer, which targeted on customer support platforms and chatbots, for $1 billion to Facebook.
Tiger Global, whose roots are in hedge fund administration, launched its non-public fairness enterprise in 2003, spearheaded by Chase Coleman, who’d beforehand labored for hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson at Tiger Management; and Scott Shleifer, who joined the agency in 2002 after spending three years with the Blackstone Group. Lee Fixel, who would develop into a key contributor within the enterprise, joined in 2006.
Shleifer targeted on China, Fixel targeted on India and the remainder of the agency’s assist staff (it now has 22 investing professionals on workers) helped discover offers in Brazil and Russia earlier than starting to focus extra aggressively on alternatives within the U.S.
Every investing determination was finally made by every of the three. Fixel left in 2019 to launch his personal funding agency, Addition. Now Shleifer and Coleman are the agency’s sole decision-makers.
Tiger Global’s buyers embody a mixture of sovereign wealth funds, foundations, endowments, pensions and its personal workers, who’re collectively believed to be the agency’s greatest buyers at this level.
Some of Tiger Global’s greatest wins so far have included a $200 million wager on the e-commerce big JD.com that produced a $5 billion for the agency. According to the WSJ, it additionally cleared greater than $1 billion on the Chinese online-services platform Meituan, which went public in 2018.
The agency additionally reaped a large windfall by way of its funding within the linked health firm Peloton, 20% of which the agency owned on the time of Peloton’s 2019 IPO.
