November looks to be an auspicious month for power investor Tiger Global. The New York-based hedge fund raised $2.5 billion for new deals back in November 2014, and now, after a spending spree that has seen it put more than $1 billion into over 50 companies in 2015 alone, a regulatory filing shows that the firm reloaded its coffers with $2.5 billion in capital on November 30.
The ever-secretive Tiger Global — which doesn’t even operate a website — had its plans for last year’s fundraising leaked out, but this year’s cash allocation is less clear. We contacted the firm for information about its plans, but had not received a reply at the time of writing. (We don’t expect to, either.)
This year has been a notable one for Tiger Global in a few ways. It lost two top executives earlier this year, leaving Lee Fixel as the sole head of its private equity business. Noteworthy, too, has been the PE fund’s push into India under the tutelage of Fixel.
It had completed 18 investments in India as of this summer, as this YourStory article explained, and its local portfolio includes an impressive array of India’s fastest growing young companies — such as e-commerce unicorn Flipkart, Uber rival Ola, delivery firm Grofers, Shopclues, robotics startup Grey Orange, media company Inshorts, and music streaming service Saavn.
But Tiger Global isn’t just about India. It has spent big outside of the South Asia country, too, backing Amazon rival Jet.com, Postmates, Credit Karma, Airbnb and numerous others — as detailed in its long, long Crunchbase entry.
While the exact plan for this new capital isn’t clear, it isn’t too hard to guess.
Tiger Global was early to India, and it seems certain that a large swathe of this new capital will go towards doubling down on its most recent bets and sleuthing out new investment opportunities in the country, where the economy continues to grow and the startup ecosystem increasingly rivals the U.S. for attention.
Much like SoftBank, which has also gone hard on India and the rest of Asia, Tiger Global has backed other high value international startups across the world — including, outside of the U.S., Uber rivals Didi Kuaidi in China and GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia — so we can expect more of this same as it seeks out similar investment opportunities worldwide, and doubles down on its existing bets.
Tiger Global’s raising of new capital comes hot on the heels of Fidelity Capital’s decision to mark up its shares in a range of companies including Dropbox and Snapchat, as Fortune reported. Just weeks prior to that, it emerged that Fidelity had written down the value of those same two investments alongside others. In other words, these private company valuations are pretty fluid and firms like Fidelity and Tiger Global will value them as they choose when they choose to.