$50 billion Tiger Global is returning to its concentrated, 'high-conviction' roots in its latest private fund

• Tiger Global, the $50 billion New York-based investor, is raising its latest private fund.
• The manager is planning to raise close to $2 billion, a person close to the firm said.
• The firm is focused on making fewer bets on companies it deeply believes in, Tiger Global told potential investors.

Tiger Global's latest private investment fund will raise substantially less money than its predecessors from 2021 and 2022, but the $50 billion asset manager isn't worried.

The firm is expected to raise close to $2 billion for PIP 17, a person familiar with the manager told Business Insider.

That's a fraction of what PIP 14 and PIP 15 raised and aligns more closely to PIP 16, which closed in early 2024 with $2.2 billion in assets after aiming initially for $6 billion.

While smaller fundraises typically coincide with a decline in investor interest, Tiger Global is confident that the size of the new fund will be a benefit for those who do decide to invest.

"Over our history, we have also found that smaller, more concentrated funds have been correlated with our strongest returns," the firm wrote in a letter to prospective investors that was seen by Business Insider.

Tiger Global declined to comment.

The first 10 private funds, the letter states, all raised less than $3 billion each, made fewer than 50 investments on average, and "generated a 34% gross IRR and a 23% net IRR and made distributions exceeding investor commitments.

"We believe funds in this size range afford us significant benefits, particularly with respect to the impact midsize investments can make," the letter reads.

In other words, Tiger Global's aggressive venture style from 2020 through 2022, when the firm led fundraising rounds seemingly every week and raised increasingly larger funds, has been replaced with one that is closer to what the firm built its business on. The manager previously wrote to investors earlier this year about how it reworked its risk systems following a 56% loss in its public-equity flagship hedge fund and compared the firm's bounce-back from that loss to golfer Rory McIlroy's Masters win.

The most recent private fund, PIP 16, has already reaped some of the benefits of the style focused on "high-conviction" bets. The fund has invested 70% of its assets across 25 companies, the letter states, with the 10 largest investments accounting for three-quarters of that total.

Among those big bets are some of the world's prominent artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI and Waymo.

"We have remained incredibly disciplined and selective" when investing PIP 16, the firm wrote, and plan to continue that with PIP 17, which will hold its first close on March 18 next year. The new fund is the latest example of Tiger Global and its peers' renewed interest in private markets.

"This approach is opportunistic, guided by bottom-up, company-level underwriting, and informed by our deep research and cumulative insights," the letter states.

"To accomplish this, PIP 17 may have a pace of deployment spanning several years. With time on our side and an accelerated pace of innovation, we intend to remain patient — waiting for attractive opportunities to make high-conviction investments."