Mumbai: Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer is stepping down as its head of private equity and will instead be a senior adviser, his exit coming amid the hedge fund’s slowing pace of investments in India.
The change will see Tiger Global form a new investment committee (IC) for its $30 billion private equity business. It will be led by founder Chase Coleman and will include partners Evan Feinberg and Griffin Schroeder, and chief operating officer Eric Lane, in addition to Schleifer.
The IC will review new investments and monitor assets in private equity.
It is not yet clear what Schleifer’s exit will mean for India, especially since the company has been less active with investments this year.
Schleifer’s decision to move out is largely based on geography, a person familiar with the development said, asking to remain anonymous.
“Tiger Global operates personally out of our New York offices, while Scott and his family have made their home in Florida and want to stay there. We’ve found that having everyone together in New York is a very productive and better operating model for our company,” Coleman said in letter to Tiger Global investors, which Mint has seen.
Coleman credited Schleifer with Tiger Global’s lucrative investments in JD.com, Ctrip.com, ByteDance, Booking.com, Apollo and Google in the letter. He also told the investors that Tiger Global had hired 12 investment and research executives starting in 2021 and expected to add more talent “to this group selectively.”
Coleman did not specifically refer to where the company would add those executives.
After Lee Fixel, who invested in early Tiger Global businesses in India such as Flipkart, Schleifer has been seen as the most visible face of the company over the past four years. Fixel left in 2019 to start his own VC fund, Addition.
Tiger Global has built a reputation among startups for being founder-friendly and hands-off. The firm rarely takes a board seat and has a more sectoral approach when it comes to investments. For example, it is likely to be invested in multiple companies in the same sector.
The firm is famous for being decisive, and at the height of the financial boom made investment calls as quickly as over a weekend.
Since January, however, Tiger Global has been virtually silent, making fewer investments in 2023 compared to previous years.
The company invested about $100 million in PhonePe in February along with other investors, and $18.5 million in Infinite Uptime in a deal led by Griffin Schroeder in April. It also invested about $40 million in Indian Premier League cricket team Rajasthan Royals earlier this year, a person familiar with the deal said. Some of its other investments over the previous three years include Sharechat, Apna, Open and NoBroker.
Overall, Tiger Global has invested alongside other investors in 257 deals worth over $27 billion in India over the past decade. It has backed 38 of the 103 unicorns minted in the country so far, via data provider Venture Intelligence.
For the previous 2 years, Tiger ordered exits. It has returned over $2.5 billion of capital from its listed portfolio in India in the last 2 years, starting with Flipkart.
In June, Walmart acquired Tiger Global’s remaining stake in Flipkart for $1.4 billion, a Wall Street Journal report said. In April, news website Arc reported that Tiger Global sold its entire stake in Freshworks for about $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Tiger Global also fully exited Zomato in August for around $120 million, while booking partial exits from Policybazaar and Delhivery.
In June, Tiger Global raised $2.7 billion for its latest private equity fund, effectively missing the $6 billion target for its 16th fund by 55 percent, according to a Financial Times report. The crash in tech stocks wiped out significant portfolio gains the company had been sitting on globally.
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Updated: 22 Nov 2023, 20:31 IST
(tagsTo Translate)Tiger Global