Tracking Tiger Global (Week 1) | 03.01-09.01.22
5 announced deals ranging from $20m Series B to $100m token sale
Dear subscribers,
Welcome to the latest edition of Tracking Tiger Global, a newsletter that provides weekly updates on Tiger Global’s latest investments. This Substack started as a “joke” but has turned into an interesting learning opportunity for me as I get to learn about awesome tech companies across sectors and geographies while tracking Tiger Global. Please note that the newsletter is not affiliated with Tiger Global and any of its portfolio companies and other entities mentioned below.
5 new deals with Tiger’s involvement were reported last week.
Serum (global | $100m | Crypto | Tiger participated)
Avataar (India | $45m Series B | Software | Tiger co-led)
ShopUp (Bangaladesh | $34m Series B extension | Fintech | Tiger co-led)
Rupifi (India | $25m Series A | Fintech | Tiger co-led)
Livepeer (US | $20m Series B-1 | Crypto | Tiger led)
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Serum (- | $100m | Crypto | Tiger participated)
Serum is a Solana-based decentralized exchange and liquidity infrastructure platform. The Incentive Ecosystem Foundation, a community-led foundation of Project Serum, has raised $75 million in a new funding round. 18 institutional investors including Commonwealth Asset Management LP, Tagus Capital, Tiger Global, and executives at GoldenTree Asset Management participated in this round. This is the second time Tiger is participating in a token deal - the first deal was Braintrust’s token sale in Dec-21.
As a decentralized exchange, Serum provides the underlying liquidity infrastructure for applications built on the Solana blockchain. “In exchange for the investment, investors get a variety of tokens, which are locked up for six years. For one year, the tokens would be stationary and then, for the next five years, investors get a set number of tokens every day, JHL said.
About 15% of the $100 million investment will be allocated to the Serum ecosystem fund, which supports projects utilizing the exchange's liquidity infrastructure and capabilities, JHL said. The remaining 85% will go to the Serum foundation itself to fund the exchange's operations.
Applications on Serum now account for more than $2 billion of total net value of all assets held by various DeFi networks, according to the IEF statement.”
According to The Block, “The foundation plans to grow the Serum ecosystem with fresh capital in place. $15 million, will be allocated for this purpose, said JHL. Through this ecosystem fund, the foundation plans to support upcoming Serum projects across areas such as DeFi, NFT, and gaming. The foundation also plans to offer business development and marketing support to such projects. The rest of the capital will be utilized toward growth initiatives for Project Serum, such as hosting hackathons and hiring, said JHL.”
Avataar.Me (India | $45m Series B | Software | Tiger co-led)
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in India, “Avataar is a 3D AI company that helps large enterprise customers create immersive and interactive shopping experiences for their end consumers.” Avataar raised $45m in Series B funding, led by Tiger Global.
According to Techcrunch, “Avataar helps direct-to-consumer brands and e-commerce marketplaces with shaping their consumer journeys with 3D rendition of products. Firms can integrate Avataar’s plug-and-play technology into their systems, which then allows customers to visualize products in real-life size and feel in their living room using the phone’s camera.” Avataar’s vision is to bridge the gap between offline-online experiences by replacing the current 2D visuals with life-size and hyper-realistic 3D XR/AR experiences.
A product demo can be viewed here.
Sources: Techcrunch
ShopUp (Bangaladesh | $34m Series B extension | Fintech | Tiger co-led)
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bangladesh, ShopUp is Bangladesh's largest full-stack B2B commerce platform for small businesses. ShopUp raised a $34m Series B extension led by Tiger Global. It should be noted that ShopUp raised $75m in Series B from Valar Ventures and Prosus Ventures four months ago.
ShopUp is (similar to India’s Udaan) a leading full-stack B2B commerce platform for small businesses. It has 3 main products:
Mokam: B2B commerce platform and core product that serves 500,000 neighborhood shops, providing access to 10,000+ products
REDX: Logistics service that has the widest last-mile logistics network in Bangladesh
Baki: Digital embedded financing product that provides supplies on credit.
Source: Thecapitalquest
Rupifi (India | $25m Series A | Fintech | Tiger co-led)
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in India, Rupifi provides embedded B2B payments and checkout for marketplaces. It raised $25m in Series A funding, co-led by Tiger Global and BVP. The latest funding is Rupifi's second investment round within 9 months, since the pre-series-A round in March 2021.
“Rupifi started with the B2B BNPL product, focusing on the digital B2B marketplaces in mid-2020. Despite the subdued economic activity, it has managed to record 50 per cent monthly growth in disbursals in the last 12 months, covering over 50,000 SMEs that work with some marquee marketplaces like Flipkart Wholesale, Retailio and Fynd, among others.”
For SMEs, Rupifi offers fully digital touchpoints and real-time decisioning throughout the lifecycle – onboarding, application decisioning, real-time transaction and repayment reconciliations. Similarly, marketplaces and financial institutions integrate deeply with Rupifi’s platform using easy to use APIs and SDKs.
Sources: Entrepreneur, Economic Times
Livepeer (US | $20m Series B-1 | Crypto | Tiger led)
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in the US, Livepeer is the decentralised video streaming network built on the Ethereum blockchain. It raised a $20 million Series B-1 from investors including Alan Howard, Tiger Global with participation from existing investors.
Targeting the $70 billion video streaming market, Livepeer enables livestreaming innovators to bring their ideas to market affordably - and to scale them without exorbitant usage fees.
Livepeer’s network already features over 70,000 GPUs, which is enough aggregated power to encode all of the video streaming through Twitch, YouTube and Facebook combined. To date, Livepeer has streamed tens of millions of minutes, passing a key milestone: a record 2.3 million minutes streamed in a single week, a six-fold increase from the start of 2021.
A company overview can be found here.
“Livepeer plans to use the funds to accelerate its execution towards capturing the growing opportunities in livestreaming infrastructure, an area that’s rapidly expanding due to the popularity of creator-driven streams, eSports and live shopping.”
Sources: Company press release