Tiger Global, the investor that fueled the 2020-2021 VC bull market, is reportedly raising $2.2 billion in new funding.
The company sent a letter to potential limited partners seeking financing for an entity called Private Investment Partners 17 (PIP 17), according to a copy obtained by CNBC. The letter also promises a more humble approach than during the crazy bull market of 2021.
Meanwhile, Tiger Global moved quickly and made deep investments, a technique known in the venture world as “spray and pray.”
As reported by TechCrunch, PIP 15 raised in 2021 was a whopping $12.7 billion in funding that pumped cash into startups at a dizzying pace, mostly at the highest valuations.
According to data from PitchBook, hedge funds backed 315 startups in 2021 alone, spurring bidding wars among venture capital firms to take stakes in even unproven startups, inching their valuations up.
When interest rates rose, the party ended and startups spent years trying to match their 2021 valuations, with many going out of business along the way.
After the venture market crash in 2022-2023, Tiger Global's prolific investor John Curtius left to start his own fund, the firm's head of private equity investments Scott Shleifer transitioned into an advisory role, and Tiger's acclaimed founder Chase Coleman took on a more direct role.
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Tiger Global went on to raise a much smaller $2.2 billion PIP 16 fund in 2024, Bloomberg reported at the time, but this is certainly still a huge fund.
Now, on the strength of PIP 16's blockbuster AI investment, Tiger Global has raised Fund 17. PIP 16 holds shares in OpenAI, Waymo, and Databricks, all of which have seen their valuations soar, driving up the fund's paper profits by 33% so far, according to the letter reported by CNBC.
Still, the letter promised a more targeted approach, nodding to the need for more caution than in previous years. According to CNBC, the company acknowledged that leaning into AI investments can be risky and requires “humility” as “valuations are elevated and, in our view, may not be supported by the company's fundamentals.” (Tiger Global could not be reached for comment.)
In other words, even though Tiger Global is raising new capital to pursue even bigger AI opportunities, it would imply that the AI market is in a bubble, and it doesn't want to push its valuation to even higher, perhaps unrealistic, heights.