Despite their optimism, Tiger Global is not ready to issue late-stage checks. Among the countries most likely to benefit from Tiger Global's new fund is India, where the firm plans to maintain its focus on the early stage.
Tiger Global Management, a New York-based hedge fund, sent its head of private investment, Scott Shleifer, to India this week to meet with startup founders, portfolio companies, and investors as part of its plan to increase its private market bets in the country, which have helped to shore up the firm's overall portfolio as tech company valuations have dropped across the board.
According to Moneycontrol, Shleifer met with investors and spoke to the CEOs of some of the largest private market enterprises in the country. Shleifer was in Bengaluru on November 21 and welcomed executives from the city and also from neighbouring places like Delhi and Gurugram.
Hedge fund insiders who met with Shleifer stated anonymously that he is "extremely optimistic" on India and views the country as a "silver-lining" when the company's US investments go south.
“Shleifer wanted to get a feel of the investment attitude in India since Tiger Global continues to stay quite optimistic on digital firms in the country,” said one of the sources cited above.
Sometime early this year, Alex Cook visited. He also met startups and early-stage investors and (Tiger Global’s) partners from India who joined him for these sessions. They are talking to portfolio firms face to face to learn about their issues, the source said.
It has been learned that while in India, he told people he met that Tiger Global's private investments in India are doing "extremely well," and that they are protecting the hedge fund company's public portfolio in India, which includes listed unicorns like Zomato, PB Fintech, Delhivery, and Nasdaq-listed Freshworks.
One of the aforementioned people added, "He hinted that his private market bets in India were a saviour."
Since the beginning of the year, Zomato and Freshworks' share prices have fallen by half, while PB Fintech's share price has fallen by about 60%. Since its initial public offering in May, Delhivery's stock price has dropped by over 40%.
According to the aforementioned sources, Tiger Global's Deep Verma will be in India next week, namely in the cities of New Delhi and Bengaluru, to meet with local business leaders and investors. According to the sources, Tiger Global's portfolio company investors and executives will also meet with Griffin Schroeder, head of consumer internet investment.
Despite their optimism, Tiger Global is not ready to issue late-stage checks. Based on what we've heard from those in the know, Tiger Global's new fund will focus on early-stage investments, with India likely reaping some of the largest rewards. The New York-based hedge fund business was in discussions to raise $6 billion in its new venture fund, Bloomberg had reported in October.
The original $8 billion budget for the new fund has been reduced, the article claims, leaving $6 billion. According to the article, Tiger Global's new fund would focus "primarily in India" on enterprise enterprises.
From its newest and biggest venture capital fund of over $13 billion it raised in March, Tiger Global informed its investors in May that more than half of the fund's investments were in Series A or Series B rounds, generally the first or second significant financings for private tech businesses.
It was also revealed that Tiger Global has increased its Series A investments in India by a factor of three this year. In the first half of 2022, the hedge fund had invested in 10 Series A rounds totaling $377.4 million, up from only three rounds in 2021 totaling $75.7 million.
Alex Cook, another partner at Tiger Global, based out of New York, who handles numerous assets in India, has travelled down to the nation at least twice this year. Moneycontrol reported in August that Cook held a meeting with a group of early-stage investors including Sequoia Capital India, Accel, and 3one4 Capital.
While many of India's largest and most aggressive early-stage investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Accel, Elevation Capital, Westbridge Capital, Rocketship VC, Fireside Ventures, and Matrix Partners, have recently raised or are in the process of raising their largest-ever India-focused funds, Tiger Global remains optimistic about the country's early-stage investment landscape.
According to statistics provided by Tracxn, early-stage investments increased by about 40% in the first nine months of 2022, reaching $4.23 billion.
Of India's 106 unicorns created thus far, Tiger Global is responsible for about 40 of them, making it one of the country's most active tech investors.
In 2022, Tiger Global backed a diverse set of unicorns in different industries, including a neo-banking platform (Open), a gaming platform (Games 24x7), a marketplace for lending to small and medium-sized businesses (Oxyzo Financial Services), a Web 3.0 infrastructure (Polygon), and a social commerce platform (Dealshare).
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