The Venture Intelligence Blog

Amidst the drama around SoftBank's $2.5 Billion investment in Flipkart, not much attention has been paid to the fact that the deal involves the exit (albeit partial) of key Flipkart backer, Tiger Global, from the most audacious Venture Capital investment in India. The VC arm of the New York-based hedge fund, led globally by Lee Fixel, is estimated to have invested $1 Billion in Flipkart starting in end 2009. Tiger's bet on Flipkart - which arguably triggered the rush to invest and create other Internet & Mobile Unicorns in India - has also been described as the single biggest risk to the technology ecosystem. " Unfortunately, due to just one individual - Lee Fixel of Tiger Global - Flipkart has gone from being a poster child to being the single biggest risk to the technology ecosystem. I hope for a soft landing ," angel investor and iSpirt co-founder Sharad Sharma had said during the heady days of 2015, when Flipkart's valuation had hit a peak of $15...

Frankie Brown of Investec has an interesting take on Indian E-Commerce in Economic Times . Extracts: The funding slowdown has revealed as much about the Indian venture capital market as the companies they evaluate. It is a small world of IIT buddies and their gossiping, of egos and posturing, bluff and counter-bluff. Where the fearful see chaos, the wise see opportunity — the market is full of increasingly attractive deals. ...What concerns me is the over-reliance of the market on such a small number of investors. With traditional private equity reluctant to get involved, and offline players choosing to remain wilfully blind, Tiger, Naspers, Soft-Bank and Alibaba have run riot, waving magic wands and making princes and paupers of those they select and jettison. There remains a concern that in the world of “bigger is better,” inefficiencies are creeping into the market. ...Valuations are a matter of conjecture, but what is happening on the ground is indisputable. The seismic shif...

Will Uber ( & Ola and Amazon & Flipkart ) Investor Tiger Global 's Going Cold on India in Q4' 15 Tell on VC investments in 2016? Click Here or on the Image below to discuss Tiger Global's seeming Hibernation.

Lee Fixel, Partner & Head of Venture Capital Riding on its early and aggressive bets in the E-Commerce segment, New York-based Tiger Global Management currently enjoys a “lion’s share” of the mindshare in the Indian Venture Capital ecosystem. At the Venture Intelligence APEX’15 PE/VC Summit in March, one VC speaker candidly admitted: “ If there is one foreign investor who knows the Indian Internet & Mobile landscape better than us locals, it’s him” (meaning Lee Fixel , the head of Tiger’s VC operations) . A mid-market Private Equity investor wistfully remarked: “ While we will never be good at it as the Tigers of the world, we really need to figure out this E-Commerce thing - if we are to produce supernormal returns for our investors ”. Sharad Sharma, Angel Investor & Co-Founder iSPIRIT writes in the Economic Times : "Unfortunately, due to just one individual - Lee Fixel of Tiger Global - Flipkart has gone from being a poster child to being the single ...

Economic Times has an article quoting some worried voices on Hedge Funds adventuring into startup territory: Hedge funds, which have fuelled frenzied deal-making in Indian internet companies and stoked valuations to stratospheric levels, are moving down the food chain to take positions in younger, smaller startups.  Early-stage startups such as Zop-Now, Vserv and MobiKwik have got hedge funds to bet on them. But as these investors plant themselves firmly in India's startup landscape, analysts as well as entrepreneurs are wary about the funds' potential to abruptly pull out in a crisis, as they did during the econom ic downturn that began in 2008. ...The entry of these high-risk appetite investors and the rising pace of deal-making reminds some investors about previous peaks in investment cycles. ...“From 2006 to 2008, we saw prop books and hedge funds say that they will be in India for the long run, some even having teams on the ground. But after 2008, we did not see ...