The eye-popping numbers behind Tiger Global’s sudden crypto splurge

At the start of last year, aside from leading Coinbase’s $300 million Series E round in October 2018, tech investment giant Tiger Global Management had steered clear of crypto.

That has changed dramatically over the last fourteen months.

The New York-based investor, which has $95 billion in assets under management, has today led or participated in no less than 35 funding rounds across the crypto-sphere — a spree that shows no signs of abating.

If anything, Tiger appears to be ramping up its crypto investments. The chart below, from The Block Research, shows that Tiger completed five crypto deals in each of the first three quarters of 2021, followed by ten in the fourth quarter. With over a month to go in the opening quarter of this year, the company has already made another ten investments.

According to Dealroom data, Tiger has had a hand in $5.6 billion of crypto fundraising since it began investing in the sector in earnest early last year.

The company’s capital has been fairly evenly spread across the industry, but the biggest winners have been trading and brokerage firms, which account for 30.6% of its crypto bets.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) and web3 outfits each account for only 5.6% of Tiger’s total crypto deals, as shown in the chart below. But the firm’s first web3 deal came in late 2021 and its debut DeFi deals were both completed in the first two months of this year.

Investing in DeFi often translates to purchasing a project’s native token — a process traditional investors are still getting to grips with. 

Tiger made its inaugural foray into token investing on December 9 last year, when it participated in a $100 million raise by decentralized talent network Braintrust. That round was led by Coatue — marking only its second token-based bet.

Several people with knowledge of the situation, granted anonymity due to the commercial sensitivity of the discussions, said that at least three leading token-focused investors have held talks with Tiger in recent months. Two of those sources said that Tiger now has roughly $5 billion in crypto investments. 

The firm’s initial DeFi dealings come against a wider backdrop of tech investors equipping themselves for token-based fundraising.

Sequoia Capital, the venerable Silicon Valley investor founded in 1972, just launched a $500-600 million crypto fund — the first vertical-specific fund in its history. The company said it will actively manage tokens through the vehicle by engaging in staking activities, providing liquidity, and participating in governance. Later-stage investors like Steven Cohen’s Point72 Ventures are also targeting token-based deals.

Josh Goodbody, COO of the DeFi infrastructure firm Qredo, told The Block in a recent interview that every growth equity investor is trying to get comfortable with token investing. “A massive amount of capital from that caliber of investor is going to enter the space into tokens,” he said.

Qredo just closed an $80 million equity round led by Dan Tapiero’s 10T Holdings. It staged a $35 million token sale in July of last year.

Tiger Global was contacted for comment on its crypto investments but did not respond by press time.