| Philippe Laffont, Coatue Management (Bloomberg) |
Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management is the latest member of Tiger Management’s extended family that’s passing the hat around for a new fund designed to invest in private companies.
Coatue is looking to raise money for the new fund and is hoping to pull in as much as $700 million, according to a person familiar with the firm’s plans. It is not clear when Coatue hopes to close the fund.
If it is successful, this will not be Coatue’s first fund dedicated to private deals. Two years ago it launched Coatue Hybrid Fund I, which aims to invest in fledgling, pre-IPO companies. In 2013, Coatue invested $50 million in Snapchat, the photo messaging application company founded by two Stanford University students who spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. It has also made two separate investments in Box, the online file sharing and cloud content management service.
The focus on private investments comes after the New York-based asset manager posted a 2.1 percent loss in its main hedge fund last year, according to an individual who has seen the results. Coatue declined to comment.
In 2013, the Coatue Qualified Partners fund posted gains in the upper teens, enabling Laffont to rank number 24 on Alpha’s annual Rich List ranking of top-earning hedge fund managers. Laffont took home $310 million that year.
Earlier in 2014 Laffont told clients he would return $2 billion amid the early spring selloff among technology and Internet stocks. However, a month or so later he told protesting investors he would probably wait until the end of the year to return the money so investors could have a better chance of making back their early-year losses.
The further move into venture capital comes shortly after Lee Ainslie III’s Maverick Capital raised at least $425 million for its new venture capital fund, which we reported last week. We reported that at the end of January, the firm had its first close of $350 million for the Maverick Private Opportunities Fund. Maverick also raised another $75 million for the Maverick Advisors Fund, which is part of the structure of Maverick Private Opportunities.
We also recently reported that O. Andreas Halvorsen’s Greenwich, Connecticut–based hedge fund firm, Viking Global Investors, has raised $1.5 billion for a new fund, Viking Global Opportunities, a liquid-illiquid — or so-called hybrid — fund designed to accommodate illiquid securities.
Of course, we have frequently reported that Charles (Chase) Coleman III’s New York–based Tiger Global Management manages $7.5 billion in its private equity and venture capital business.
