It took some time, but Tiger Global Management is starting to wring some serious paydays out of its tech investments.
In one of its biggest wins to date, the secretive, 16-year-old, New York-based hedge fund is reportedly set to make roughly $3 billion off Flipkart, the India-based e-commerce juggernaut that’s selling a majority stake in its business to Walmart for a whopping $16 billion.
Part of that stake includes three-quarters of the roughly 20 percent of Flipkart that Tiger had come to own since writing its first ($9 million) check to the company back in 2009.
In a lesser but apparent win, Tiger should also see a return on its investment in Glassdoor, the jobs and salary website that announced yesterday it is being acquired by the Japanese human resources company Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in cash.
Tiger had led the company’s $50 million Series E back in late 2013 when Glassdoor was still very much expected to go public. Earlier venture backers like Sutter Hill Ventures and Benchmark will see bigger returns, as they bought in at the A round when Glassdoor’s valuation was just beginning to ramp up. Still, it’s probably safe to assume that Tiger made a little something, too. One clue is that in 2016, during its Series H round, Glassdoor was assigned a post-money valuation of $1 billion, presumably more than the company was worth when Tiger bought in more than two years earlier.
It’s a lot of good news, and it’s saying nothing of Spotify’s direct listing on the stock market last month, another deal that involves Tiger Global. In fact, Tiger had become one of the streaming company’s biggest shareholders in recent years, and like Flipkart and Glassdoor, that position is also poised to pay off. Consider that Tiger owned 7.2 percent of Spotify as of its first day of trading in April, and the value of that stake was $1.9 billion. It may still be. Spotify’s shares are trading roughly where they started, and if Tiger has sold any of its stake, it hasn’t revealed as much. (Some of Spotify’s major record label shareholders have sold theirs and reported as much on their earnings calls.)
Either way, you can bet these wins will go a long way with investors, who are probably in the process of committing to Tiger Global’s newest mega fund as we type. Why we think there’s one in the works: The outfit registered its last giant fund — a $2.5 billion vehicle — with the SEC a little less than 2.5 years ago, and Tiger puts its capital to work. It seemingly slowed down slightly from some furious deal-making in 2015, when it invested $1 billion across more than 50 companies and a year later reported negative returns. But the outfit remains active.
Just last month, Green Bits, a four-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based maker of point-of-sale software for cannabis retailers, announced $17 million in Series A funding led by Tiger. It also recently wrote a check to Chargebee, a seven-year-old, Walnut, Calif.-based maker of SaaS subscription management and recurring billing software that closed on $18 million in Series C funding in March. In keeping with its longtime tradition, Tiger has also continued to invest in companies in India and other developing countries, participating earlier this year in a $51 million Series D funding for NestAway, a nearly four-year-old, Bengaluru, India-based home rental startup.
Altogether, Tiger Global has made more than 200 investments in 30 countries, according to Bloomberg. As for its Flipkart deal, the firm is presumably celebrating it today. The return on that investment will now be among the largest that the group’s $11 billion venture unit has seen, reports the outlet.