Coatue Management
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Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
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Coatue Management is an American technology-focused investment firm founded in 1999 by Philippe Laffont, a former analyst at Julian Robertson's Tiger Management and one of the "Tiger Cubs" who spun out of that firm to launch their own funds. Headquartered in the Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street in New York, with additional offices in Menlo Park, London, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Coatue runs a technology, media and telecommunications hedge fund alongside a large suite of private venture and growth (crossover) funds. By the mid-2020s the firm had become one of the most active backers of artificial intelligence companies, leading or co-leading rounds for CoreWeave, Anthropic and the AI coding company Anysphere, and holding stakes in OpenAI, xAI and Scale AI.
Philippe Laffont was born in Belgium to a French family and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 with a degree in computer science. He worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company in the early 1990s before joining Tiger Management in 1996, where he covered European telecommunications and technology stocks. Tiger, run by Julian Robertson, produced more than two dozen prominent fund managers known collectively as the Tiger Cubs after Robertson wound down outside capital in 2000. Laffont left in 1999 to start Coatue, which he named after a beach on Nantucket. The firm launched its first hedge fund that year with about $45 million in capital.
Laffont's brother, Thomas Laffont, is a co-founder and leads the firm's private investing. Thomas came from a different background, having worked in the entertainment industry, and over time he built out Coatue's private-markets capabilities as the firm expanded beyond public equities into venture and growth investing. Philippe Laffont remains the founder, chief investment officer and portfolio manager. Forbes estimated his net worth at roughly $7.9 billion in 2026, ranking him among the several hundred wealthiest people in the world.
Coatue operates as a crossover manager, meaning it invests in both public and private companies out of related strategies. The public side is the technology, media and telecommunications hedge fund. The private side spans a series of venture and growth vehicles, including funds disclosed in regulatory filings such as Coatue Private Fund I (2013), the Coatue Early Stage Fund (2019) and Coatue Growth Fund IV (2020, around $3.5 billion).
Reported assets under management vary by source and by how the figure is measured. Hedgeweek put Coatue's firm-wide assets near $50 billion in late 2024, with the flagship hedge fund around $14 billion. By early 2026 some outlets described it as a "$54 billion" manager, and in March 2026 Bloomberg referred to "Laffont's $70 billion Coatue." Separately, the firm's regulatory 13F long book of US-listed equities climbed over the course of 2025, from roughly $23 billion early in the year to about $36 billion by mid-year and close to $41 billion by the third quarter, as Coatue rotated heavily into AI beneficiaries. That public book has been concentrated in names such as Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Amazon and Broadcom; Coatue trimmed several large positions, including selling roughly 15 percent of its Tesla stake, late in 2025.
In May 2025 Coatue launched the Coatue Innovation Fund, branded CTEK, its first tender-offer fund aimed at individual investors and financial advisors. It launched with $1 billion in anchor commitments split between Bezos Expeditions, the family office of Jeff Bezos, and DFO Management, the family office of Michael Dell. CTEK is a continuously offered, closed-end vehicle that allocates between 20 and 50 percent of assets to private holdings and the rest to public equities, with a $50,000 minimum and quarterly tender offers for limited liquidity. It later joined the iCapital and CAIS alternative-investment marketplaces in 2026. Around the same period Coatue raised capital for its flagship fund (reported by Hedgeweek as a roughly $1 billion target, its first such raise in several years) and, per Bloomberg, weighed launching a dedicated AI and technology fund.
Coatue's most visible AI bet is generative AI infrastructure and the foundation-model labs. In May 2024 it led CoreWeave's $1.1 billion round (described by the company and reporters as a Series C-stage financing) at a $19 billion valuation, with participation from Magnetar, Altimeter, Fidelity and others; CoreWeave rents Nvidia GPUs for AI training and went public the following year. In late 2025 Coatue co-led, alongside Accel, Anysphere's $2.3 billion round at a $29.3 billion valuation; Anysphere makes the AI coding tool Cursor, which crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue that year.
The firm's largest single AI commitment has been to Anthropic. After signing a term sheet in January 2026 to anchor a round at a $350 billion valuation, Coatue and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC led Anthropic's $30 billion Series G, which closed in February 2026 at a $380 billion post-money valuation, with D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX among the co-leads. Anthropic's own announcement names GIC and Coatue as the lead investors.
Coatue is also a shareholder in OpenAI, though it has taken part in those financings rather than leading them. It first invested in OpenAI's roughly $40 billion round of March 2025, which was led by SoftBank at a $300 billion valuation and also drew Microsoft, Altimeter and Thrive Capital. It again participated in OpenAI's subsequent mega-round in 2026. Coatue holds a stake in Elon Musk's xAI as well, which TechCrunch reported in May 2026, although the specific round of entry has not been disclosed.
In data and applications, Coatue has backed Scale AI since its 2019 Series C and participated in later rounds, including the $1 billion Series F of May 2024 (a $13.8 billion valuation, led by Accel) before Meta took a 49 percent stake in Scale in 2025. Coatue also moved into vertical AI: it joined legal-AI company Harvey as a new investor in the February 2025 Series D at a $3 billion valuation, then co-led Harvey's $300 million Series E in June 2025 (a $5 billion valuation) with Kleiner Perkins, and kept participating as Harvey's valuation rose to $11 billion by March 2026. The table below summarizes the principal AI positions and Coatue's role in each.
| Company | Round and year | Coatue's role |
|---|---|---|
| CoreWeave | $1.1B round, May 2024 ($19B valuation) | Lead |
| Anthropic | Series G, $30B, Feb 2026 ($380B post-money) | Co-lead, with GIC |
| Anysphere (Cursor) | Series D, $2.3B, Nov 2025 ($29.3B valuation) | Co-lead, with Accel |
| Harvey | Series E, $300M, June 2025 ($5B); Series D, Feb 2025 ($3B) | Co-lead of Series E, with Kleiner Perkins; investor in Series D |
| OpenAI | ~$40B round, March 2025 ($300B); 2026 mega-round | Participant |
| xAI | Stake held, round not disclosed | Investor |
| Scale AI | Series C 2019 onward; Series F, May 2024 ($13.8B) | Early backer and participant |
Coatue's AI thesis extends into physical infrastructure. In May 2026 it launched a venture called Next Frontier to acquire land near large power sources and convert the parcels into data center sites. Next Frontier formed a joint venture with Fluidstack, a cloud-infrastructure company that had separately agreed to build data centers for Anthropic. TechCrunch reported that Coatue holds stakes across the AI compute stack, including in Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and the data center operators DayOne and CoreWeave. Coatue declined to comment on the specifics of the venture.
Laffont is a frequent commentator on AI markets and co-hosts Coatue's annual East Meets West (EMW) conference with his brother. In Coatue's 2025 EMW keynote the firm framed "What are you going to do in the face of AI?" as the central question for chief executives, and presented an unusually bullish view of what it called the AI supercycle, arguing that each technology wave (mainframes, personal computers, the internet, software as a service) builds on the last and produces progressively larger winners. Coatue named Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and OpenAI among the companies leading the build-out, and floated a "Fantastic 40" framing as a successor to the Magnificent Seven, predicting a wider set of dominant companies by 2030. Laffont and his team have also argued that a new class of large private technology firms is growing faster than most public companies, a thesis that underpins Coatue's crossover structure and the CTEK fund.
Coatue is one of the best-known of the Tiger Cub funds, the group of managers who trained under Julian Robertson at Tiger Management before founding their own firms. That lineage includes Chase Coleman's Tiger Global Management, Stephen Mandel's Lone Pine Capital and Andreas Halvorsen's Viking Global, among more than 200 funds traced back to Tiger. Like Tiger Global, Coatue pushed aggressively from public-equity hedge funds into late-stage private technology investing during the 2010s, which positioned it to write large checks into the AI companies that emerged later.
Within Coatue, the Laffont brothers remain the defining figures: Philippe on the public and overall investment strategy, and Thomas on private investing. The firm has also become a training ground in its own right. In March 2026 TechCrunch reported that a former Coatue partner raised a $65 million seed round for an enterprise AI agents startup, one example of alumni leaving to build or fund AI companies. Coatue's broader portfolio over the years has spanned consumer and internet names such as ByteDance, Spotify, Snap and DoorDash, but its 2024 to 2026 activity has centered firmly on artificial intelligence, both in its public book and across its venture and growth funds.