That's no tiger, that's a tabby!
The late-stage market is whacked. You only need to look at how Tiger Global Management, previously one of the most active investors in all of startup-dom, has failed to find a buyer for a large basket of its stakes in private tech companies.
The fact that Tiger did not, as PitchBook wrote, find a buyer for “a percentage of its stakes in about 30 companies [packaged in a] strip sale” implies the issue here was that Tiger did not find a buyer willing to pay however much it wanted for those stakes.
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LPs in venture funds put their money into an aggregated pool that is then used by the venture firm to purchase a number of stakes in a variety of companies. The difference between an LP in a new fund and Tiger, which is looking to sell a wide swath of stakes, is that the traditional LP can’t know where its pledged capital will end up.
Tiger, on the other hand, reportedly was looking to sell a basket of its stakes to what we presume is a similar customer base. Its failing to find a buyer for that collection implies that, in this case, more information is not helping move those shares.
PitchBook reports that Tiger is now looking to sell individual stakes in some of its portfolio companies to generate liquidity. Other investors are also struggling to sell collections of stakes, but they’re not seeing bids either, the report said.
Tiger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.