Tiger Global, a technology investor, has seen losses grow since the end of the IT inflation last year. Bets on blue-chip crypto startups have left the once-voracious tech investor scarred. Major crypto firms in its portfolio are being discounted, amounting to one fund claiming a 20% paper loss.
The investment firm has faced a period of prolonged losses after emerging as one of the IT sector’s largest investors. In November 2022, its flagship hedge fund announced annual losses of 54.7%. The Wall Street Journal later revealed in March that Tiger had reduced the value of its private funds by an average of 33% in 2022.
Tiger recently warned investors that the company’s $12.7 billion venture fund is losing money. As of December last year, this fund has created a paper loss of 20%, net of management costs, since its inception in late October 2021. According to The Information who have claimed to use private documents to establish the point.
An investment in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, which failed in November, was completely lost. The company has made a $38 million investment in the exchange. Tiger also reduced its stake in the NFT marketplace OpenSea. In November 2021 and January 2022, the business invested $126.8 million in the venture. However, by the end of last year, Tiger had reduced the investment to $30.2 million, a 76% decrease. According to the report, other investments included Yuga Labs, the inventor of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, payments business MoonPay, decentralised wireless network startup Helium, and Sam Altman’s eyeball scanning technology Worldcoin.
Tiger has also had to write down its largest holding, ByteDance. Tiger invested $144.6 million in the China-based firm in secondary deals through its newest fund in mid-2021. The report also says that Tiger valued the investments at $100.8 million in September of last year. Tiger has invested more than $2 billion in ByteDance throughout the course of its history and at various values.
Tiger’s venture fund has spent more than $11 billion to date as reported by The Information. Almost a fifth of the money has gone to firms that provide enterprise software as a service. Tiger’s second and third largest investment sectors in these investments are fintech and cryptocurrency, respectively.
Even the Crunchbase statistics indicate that Tiger has significantly reduced its investments over the last year. The firm closed 158 agreements in the first half of last year, but only 21 so far this year. The writedowns follow reports that Tiger had decreased the goal size for its newest venture fund to $5 billion, down from a $6 billion objective announced last autumn. This is less than half of what the business expected to raise early last year.
