Tiger Global Management
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Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
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Tiger Global Management is an American investment firm headquartered in New York that operates a technology-focused hedge fund alongside one of the world's largest crossover venture and growth-equity businesses. It was founded in March 2001 by Chase Coleman III, a protege of Julian Robertson and one of the original "Tiger Cubs" who started their own funds after Robertson wound down Tiger Management.[1][3] Tiger Global became known for early stakes in companies such as Facebook, Stripe, ByteDance, and JD.com, and notorious for the speed of its 2020 and 2021 startup spree, which gave way to record losses in 2022. The firm has since retrenched, rebuilt its public returns, and returned selectively to dealmaking with a heavy concentration in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI, Scale AI, and Sierra.[1][13][15]
Chase Coleman, born in 1975 and a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, worked as a technology analyst at Tiger Management from 1997 to 2000.[1][4] When Robertson closed the fund in 2000, he entrusted Coleman with more than $25 million to manage, making him one of roughly thirty Tiger Cubs.[1] Coleman launched the firm in March 2001 as Tiger Technology, a long/short hedge fund investing in public technology stocks; it was later renamed Tiger Global Management.[1]
The firm's defining early move came in 2003, when Scott Shleifer expanded it into private investing, making prescient bets on early Chinese internet companies that produced outsized returns and built the firm's reputation.[1][3] Those wins established Tiger Global's signature crossover model: a single manager investing across public equities and private startups, often holding the same company before and after its initial public offering.[3] By the 2010s the firm had backed pre-IPO winners including Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, JD.com, Flipkart, and Stripe.[1] According to Preqin data cited in its corporate history, Tiger Global raised more capital than any other venture firm between 2007 and 2017.[1]
By the start of the 2020s Tiger Global had become the most prolific large technology investor in the world, deploying capital across public markets and a rapidly growing private portfolio. Its venture pace turned extraordinary during the pandemic-era boom. The firm invested in about 69 companies in 2020, then accelerated roughly tenfold over the following year.[1][18] In 2021 it backed more than 300 startups, took part in 361 deals by PitchBook's count, and led 212 financing rounds, frequently writing very large checks within days and at peak valuations.[18] The approach, light on traditional due diligence and premised on winning competitive deals through speed and price, earned the label "spray and pray."[5][18]
The strategy was funded by ever-larger pools of capital. In March 2022 Tiger Global closed its fifteenth Private Investment Partners fund, known as PIP 15, at $12.7 billion, then the largest venture fund ever raised; most of it was deployed by May 2022.[1][5] The wager was that backing hundreds of software and internet startups at scale would yield enough breakout winners to carry the rest. Rising interest rates and collapsing technology valuations in 2022 upended that thesis almost immediately.[5][18]
The reversal in 2022 was among the most severe in hedge fund history. Tiger Global's flagship hedge fund fell about 52% in the first half of 2022 and roughly 56% for the full year, while its long-only fund dropped about 62% by midyear.[1][18] Large public positions in Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba and JD.com, already battered by Beijing's 2021 regulatory crackdown, compounded losses in US growth stocks.[1]
The damage extended to the private book that had defined the firm's recent expansion. Bloomberg reported that Tiger Global cut the value of its venture holdings by about 24% through November 2022, and by roughly 33% for the full year, erasing around $23 billion of value.[6][7] Markdowns hit Stripe and Instacart, and the firm wrote its roughly $38 million stake in the collapsed crypto exchange FTX down to zero.[1][6] Across its public and private portfolios, Tiger Global's assets fell by about $42 billion in 2022, one of the largest such declines on record.[8]
PIP 15 became the emblem of the era's excess. A December 2024 disclosure showed the fund still carrying paper losses of more than 15% as of June 30, 2024, placing it in the bottom 10% of all venture funds raised in 2021; individual positions such as Superhuman, DuckDuckGo, and OpenSea were marked down by 45%, 72%, and 94% respectively.[5] Tiger Global sharply curtailed new dealmaking, cutting its annual private investment count from the 212 rounds it led in 2021 to single digits within a few years.[18]
The public side recovered faster than the private one. The hedge fund gained about 29% in 2023, snapping a two-year losing streak and topping peers including Coatue Management, and returned roughly 24% in 2024.[9][10] Through August 2025 it was up about 7.5% for the year, lagging several fellow Tiger Cubs.[19]
Tiger Global's reported assets under management vary considerably depending on the source and on which vehicles are counted. The firm has described firmwide AUM of about $55.9 billion in May 2024, and third-party trackers reported figures climbing toward the $70 billion to $79 billion range across 2025 and into 2026 as markets recovered.[1] That total spans a public hedge fund, a long-only fund, and a series of private investment partnerships; the firm's US-listed long-equity portfolio disclosed in quarterly filings is only a fraction of the broader number, since most private holdings and non-US positions do not appear there.[1] Whatever the precise figure, the firm's asset base contracted sharply in 2022, when combined public and private losses cut about $42 billion from its holdings.[8] Tiger Global has reported managing roughly twenty pooled investment vehicles, several of them hedge funds.[1]
Artificial intelligence has become the center of Tiger Global's renewed activity. The firm first bought shares in OpenAI in 2021 and, in September 2024, moved to join the round that valued the company above $150 billion.[11][12] OpenAI and Scale AI became two of Tiger Global's largest private positions and, according to investor-letter reporting, drove a roughly 35% gain in its biggest private holdings in 2024; the OpenAI stake in particular helped offset losses in the PIP 15 megafund.[10][11] Tiger Global had co-led Scale AI's $325 million Series E in 2021 at a valuation near $7.3 billion, a bet that paid off in June 2025 when Meta took a 49% stake in the data-labeling company in a deal worth about $14.3 billion and hired founder Alexandr Wang.[20]
The firm's recent flagship AI deal is Sierra, the enterprise AI agents startup co-founded by Bret Taylor. In May 2026 Tiger Global and Alphabet's GV co-led Sierra's $950 million round at a post-money valuation above $15 billion (reported at about $15.8 billion), with participation from Benchmark, Sequoia, and Greenoaks.[15][16] The earlier $350 million round, which valued Sierra at $10 billion in September 2025, was led by Greenoaks Capital rather than Tiger Global.[15] Tiger Global has also backed Upscale AI, an AI-networking infrastructure startup, across a 2025 seed round and a $200 million Series A in early 2026.[13]
Tiger Global has framed this as a disciplined return rather than a repeat of 2021. Its 2024 fund, PIP 16, closed at $2.2 billion, far below an original $6 billion target, and holds stakes in OpenAI, Databricks, and Waymo that had generated about 33% in paper gains by late 2025.[13] On December 8, 2025, the firm announced a new $2.2 billion fund, PIP 17, promising a more targeted approach and warning limited partners that AI valuations were "elevated and, in our view, sometimes unsupported by company fundamentals."[13][14]
| Company | Round / year | Tiger Global's role |
|---|---|---|
| Scale AI | Series E, 2021 (~$325M, ~$7.3B valuation) | Co-led the round; gains realized when Meta took a 49% stake in 2025 |
| OpenAI | Secondary shares from 2021; joined 2024 round valuing it above $150B | Investor and one of its largest private positions |
| Cohere | Growth rounds, 2021 | Early investor; sold part of its stake in 2023 at a ~$3B valuation |
| Databricks | Held via PIP 16 (2024 fund) | Investor |
| Waymo | Held via PIP 16 (2024 fund) | Investor |
| Upscale AI | Seed 2025; $200M Series A, early 2026 | Investor and early backer |
| Sierra | Series E, May 2026 ($950M, above $15B valuation) | Co-led with GV |
Chase Coleman III founded the firm and remains its chief investment officer and controlling figure. Forbes has estimated his net worth in the multibillion-dollar range, at about $7 billion in early 2026.[4] After the 2022 losses he took more direct control of both the public and private investing teams.[17]
Scott Shleifer built Tiger Global's private-investing business beginning in 2003 and ran it for two decades, making the early China internet bets that established the firm. In November 2023 he transitioned to a senior advisory role and relocated to Florida, a change Coleman tied partly to keeping the core team together in New York.[17]
Lee Fixel, who joined in 2006 and led many of the firm's venture bets, including its lucrative stake in India's Flipkart, left in 2019 to found his own firm, Addition.[1] Another senior investor, software-focused partner John Curtius, departed in 2022 to start his own fund, part of a broader turnover among the firm's investing ranks during and after the downturn.[1]