Cat Fight? Co-Investment & Competition Among Tiger Cubs

We used the Business Social Graph to analyze where Tiger Cubs' portfolios overlap, and where they compete.

When Julian Robertson shut down his famous hedge fund Tiger Management in 2000, he seeded a number of his analysts with capital to start their own funds. The initial seeding created over 30 hedge funds, while many others have spun out of these seed tiger entities. These funds are now referred to as “Tiger Cubs”.

In public markets, Tiger Cubs have been known to invest in similar companies.

Source: Novus

In the private markets (tech and broader VC space), Tiger Global Management is at the forefront of the boom of hedge funds investing in tech, however other notable Tiger Cubs investing in the space include Coatue Management, Maverick Capital, Valiant Capital, Viking Global, and Falcon Edge Capital, while Lone Pine Capital, and Glade Brook Capital both were part of a consortium of Tiger Cubs that contributed the bulk of the money to Uber’s $1.2B Series E financing.

We used the CB Insights Business Social Graph to analyze the tech and VC investing activity of some of the more active Tiger Cubs. Specifically, we looked at all of their investments since 2011 and while there were co-investments between funds (Coatue and Tiger share NextDoor,Uxin Pai, and Kuaidi Dache in their portfolio) we also saw two main points of competition in lending and e-hailing apps.

In lending:

• Tiger previously invested in Avant, OnDeck Capital (now public), and DianRong.
• Coatue’s opposing bet was in now-public Lending Club.

While it may not be a zero-sum game, the e-hailing industry is in the midst of one of the most well-funded competitions any venture-backed tech industry has seen in years.

• The previously stated group of Tiger Cubs (Valiant Capital, Glade Brook Capital, and Lone Pine Capital) all have made a huge bet on Uber while in the US, Coatue has an opposing bet in Lyft.
• Internationally Coatue just invested in Kuaidi Dache, one of Tiger Global’s international e-hailing bets, which also includes 99Taxis, Olacabs, and GrabTaxi.

Other direct competitors include Box, which Coatue invested in pre-IPO in its Series G versusDropbox which landed an investment from Valiant Capital Partners in 2011. (Note: See our earlier brief on Dropbox’s irrational valuation). Maverick Capital and Viking Global both have remained relatively distant from the Tiger Cub network in private markets.

See below for the full social graph of Tiger Cubs.