The Tiger Cubs are on the hunt — and they’re ready to pounce on private market opportunities.
Big-name asset managers such as Tiger Global, Coatue, and D1 — a group collectively known as Tiger Cubs, given their connections to the late Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management — are back to investing in private markets, talking about start-ups, and fundraising for non-public strategies.
These managers, once burned by the 2022 tech market rout, when soaring interest rates and plunging valuations forced them to retreat, are now riding the artificial intelligence boom in big-name tech stocks and late-stage private companies alike. In private markets specifically, there’s been a slight uptick in the number of deals these crossover investors have done in 2025 compared to the last two years, and a significant jump in the size of checks they’ve been writing.
PitchBook data shows that the median valuation of private companies in which Tiger Global has invested so far in 2025 is more than $2 billion, compared to roughly $300 million in 2022. The venture rounds and private deals these funds have done this year are, on average, significantly larger than what they were doing three years ago, according to PitchBook.
Even with public equity markets as strong as ever, hitting record highs in late October before a dip at the start of the month, private markets are where hedge-fund stockpickers hoping to distinguish themselves from cheap index investors and run-of-the-mill mutual funds are flocking.
D1 founder Dan Sundheim, who originally made his name in the industry compiling deep dives on potential short bets of public companies in an online investing forum, said “public markets bring distraction and pressure” to top startups.
“Many private companies would do better staying private,” Sundheim said on a podcast with Stripe cofounder John Collison last month.
The public markets are desperate for new entrants, but the “IPO market is broken beyond repair,” according to Coatue’s founder, Philippe Laffont, who invests across both public and private tech companies.
Investing in private companies has become an easier way to bet on long-term potential, he said, thanks in part to the efficiency and number of players in the public markets.
Speaking at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference earlier this month, Laffont said an investor in a public stock has to ask, “Not only do you believe in the future, but is it already priced in or not?”
Wary of 2022’s troubles
In 2020 and 2021, these firms, especially Tiger Global, helped fuel sky-high valuations for startups with a plethora of bets across the board. The pain in 2022 forced these managers to do some soul-searching, and Tiger Global reworked its risk management processes.
Now, even smaller Tiger Cubs have returned to private markets in recent times after a pause.
Mala Gaonkar’s SurgoCap was a part of iCapital’s $820 million raise this summer. Gaonkar’s former firm, longtime Tiger Cub Lone Pine Capital, resumed private-marketing investing last year when it backed Canva and travel platform Spotnana — the manager’s first venture bets since late 2021. This year, the firm invested in Singapore payments startup Airwallex.
Meanwhile, Maverick Capital’s stand-alone private markets fund focused on AI, Maverick Silicon, has done eight deals since launching in mid-2024.
Funds mentioned declined to comment.
This isn’t to say that these managers are selling all of their publicly traded stocks or that these funds just started investing in private AI companies. Tiger Global backed OpenAI in 2021, for example, at a valuation of $15.7 billion; the company is now worth more than 30 times that.
Publicly traded chipmakers and tech giants investing in AI are among the top holdings for most of the Tiger Cubs, regulatory filings show, and Maverick Silicon’s head, Andrew Homan, said at October’s Robin Hood conference that public chipmakers like Nvidia and SK Hynix would be smart bets in the coming decade.
Valuations for private companies like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to surge, though, and pure-play venture funds and crossover managers, such as the Tiger Cubs, are ready to put their billions of capital to work.
“As we like to say in this industry, it’s on,” said Tiger Global’s founder, Chase Coleman, at the Robin Hood conference.
