Even while the prolific startup investor Tiger Global Management has been stepping up the pace of its investments in Indian startups with multiple B2B bets, particularly on the enterprise or cloud side, its B2C side isn’t dried up. Tiger Global, which will see the departure of its partner Lee Fixel at the end of June this year, has already made around five bets in consumer-facing businesses after slowing down on India investments post-2015. Since October 2017, Tiger Global has backed tea cafe chain Chaayos, grocery delivery startup Grofers, video app Roposo, and Ola Electric Mobility (the e-mobility arm of cab-hailing company Ola).
The global investor had secured $3.75 billion in October 2018 for its latest fund — Private Investment Partners XI to back companies in consumer internet, cloud, and industry-specific software markets along with consumer brands companies in China, India and the US.
“We believe the internet is the defining economic theme of this generation,” Financial Times had quoted the fund saying in its investor materials. “Without a substantial percentage of one’s assets allocated to this theme, we believe it will be difficult to outperform.”
The latest B2C bet made by Tiger Global is in its existing portfolio company — digital content/over-the-top platform The Viral Fever (TVF) in which it has put $5 million, as per regulatory filings sourced by business signals platform Paper.vc.
“Regulatory documents show that Tiger Global is putting around $5 million in TVF’s Series D round via (its) Internet Fund III,” Vivek Durai, Founder, Paper.vc told Financial Express Online.
Also read: Why Tiger Global is hunting for enterprise technology startups
TVF, which has over 6 million subscribers on YouTube, had last raised $5.8 million in June 2018 in its Series C round from Tiger Global.
With the new round of funding, TVF’s valuation stands at “$82 million not accounting for new Series D participants,” said Durai. This is at least a 13.8 per cent increase from last year’s Series C, he added.
Tiger Global has invested in close to 12 startups focusing on India in just around eight months.
“Tiger Global is now seeing more opportunity in the Indian market and so they are coming back to look at next set of startups to scale up from here. They had backed multiple startups out of which some didn’t work while in some they made a killing, so that’s the kind of game they had,” Harish HV, former Partner, India Leadership team, Grant Thornton India had told FE Online.
TVF’s CEO Arunabh Kumar had to step down in 2016 following charges of molestation allegedly by a former employee at TVF in an anonymous blog post.
