Tiger Global plans cautious venture future with a new $2.2B fund

Tiger Global, the investor that spurred the VC bull market of 2020-2021, is reportedly raising a fresh $2.2 billion fund.

The firm sent a letter to potential limited partners, according to a copy obtained by CNBC, seeking to raise the cash for a vehicle called Private Investment Partners 17 (PIP 17). The letter also promises a more humble approach than during the 2021 bull-market madness.

During that time, Tiger Global was moving fast and investing abundantly, a method the venture industry calls “spray and pray.”

PIP 15, raised in 2021, was a whopping $12.7 billion fund that pumped cash into startups at a blinding pace largely at peak valuations, TechCrunch reported. 

In 2021 alone, the hedge fund backed 315 startups, according to PitchBook data, and spurred bidding wars among VCs to get stakes in even unproven startups that ratcheted up valuations.

When interest rates rose, the party was over, and startups spent years trying to live up to their 2021 valuations, many shuttering along the way.

After the venture market crash in 2022-23, prolific Tiger Global investor John Curtius left to start his own fund, and Scott Shleifer, the firm’s chief of private equity investments, transitioned to an advisory role, while Tiger’s famed founder, Chase Coleman, took on a more direct role.

Tiger Global went on to raise a much smaller PIP 16 fund of $2.2 billion in 2024, Bloomberg reported at the time, which is, admittedly, still an enormous fund.

Now, on the strength of PIP 16’s blockbuster AI investments, Tiger Global is raising Fund 17. PIP 16 holds stakes in OpenAI, Waymo and Databricks, all of which have had skyrocketing valuations and driven this fund’s paper gains by 33% so far, the letter said as reported by CNBC.

Still, in a nod to the need for more caution than in previous years, the letter promised a more targeted approach. It acknowledged that leaning into AI investments could be risky and require “humility” because “valuations are elevated and, in our view, sometimes unsupported by company fundamentals,” according to CNBC. (Tiger Global could not be immediately reached for comment.)

In other words, even as Tiger Global raises a fresh fund to go after more big AI opportunities, it’s implying that the AI market is in a bubble, and it doesn’t want to drive valuations to even higher, perhaps unrealistic, heights.