Tiger Global: The New York crossover fund that fuelled India's startup boom

Who they are

Tiger Global Management is a research-driven, New York-based investment firm founded in 2001 by Chase Coleman III, a former partner at Julian Robertson's legendary Tiger Management — making it among the most famous of the "Tiger Cub" funds. It is a true crossover investor: its public equity business runs long/short, long-focused and crossover strategies in public growth companies, while its private equity business backs early through late-stage private companies. Over more than 25 years it has invested in over 30 countries with more than 90 portfolio company IPOs.

Investment thesis

Tiger Global describes its aim as identifying and investing in the best companies in the world at any stage of their lifecycle, and taking a long-term approach to partnering with high-quality, innovative companies across the public and private markets. It focuses on the internet, software, consumer and financial technology industries, with a global mandate spanning the US, China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It is known for moving fast on high-conviction growth bets.

Sectors and stages

The firm invests from early stage through late stage in internet, software, consumer and fintech. In India its bets have spanned consumer internet, B2B marketplaces, SaaS, edtech, healthtech and fintech, with a renewed focus in recent years on B2B startups alongside select consumer internet wagers.

Fund size and cheque sizes

Tiger Global has not publicly disclosed its total assets under management. Its private fund series has scaled dramatically: Private Investment Partners XII raised $3.8 billion in 2020 (oversubscribed, per The Wall Street Journal via TechCircle), and the thirteenth fund raised $6.65 billion, its biggest corpus at the time, per ET — with India named as one of its three key geographies alongside China and the US. Cheque sizes are not publicly disclosed; observed deals range from early-stage rounds to $200 million-plus late-stage cheques (it put $200 million into Byju's and led $90 million rounds in Ola Electric and Moglix).

Notable portfolio

Tiger has backed more than 160 Indian companies, deploying an estimated $3.4 billion across 83 of them (Venture Intelligence data via ET). Its biggest India bets include Flipkart — its best Indian exit, selling its stake for $3.5 billion, roughly 3x on a $1.2 billion total investment — Ola, Ola Electric, Zomato, MakeMyTrip, Just Dial (a reported ~18x return), Quikr, Delhivery, Freshworks (Freshdesk), PolicyBazaar, Byju's, Ninjacart, Moglix and Cred. Globally, its official portfolio examples include Facebook, LinkedIn, JD.com, Spotify, ByteDance, Uber, Nubank, Stripe, Snowflake and AI leaders OpenAI, Databricks, Waymo, Cerebras and Scale.

Partners and team

The firm is led by founder Chase Coleman III, who oversees all investment activities, with longtime partner Scott Shleifer in private investing. Lee Fixel led Tiger's big India bets and the 2014–15 financing bull run before leaving in 2019 to launch his own fund, Addition.

Programs, accelerators and perks

Tiger Global runs no public accelerator or founder programme, and has no publicly documented startup credit or perk scheme — it engages founders purely as an investor.