Lee Ainslie III’s Maverick Capital has raised at least $425 million for its new venture capital fund.
At the end of January, the firm had its first close of $350 million for Maverick Private Opportunities Fund. Maverick also raised another $75 million for Maverick Advisors Fund, which is part of the structure of Maverick Private Opportunities.
Both offerings are ongoing, according to a person familiar with the funds. The Wall Street Journal reported late last year that Maverick was raising money for a venture capital fund. Maverick is among a number of hedge fund firms with roots in Julian Robertson Jr.’s Tiger Management Corp. that are still actively making private investments. Many of them have been very busy of late.
For example, earlier this week Philippe Laffont’s New York–based Coatue Management disclosed it owns a 9.9 percent stake in Box, a cloud computing company that went public on January 23. The stock soared soon after it began trading before settling back, though today it is still more than 20 percent above its initial public offering price. Last year Coatue invested $75 million in Box when it was still private.
Before the IPO, Coatue’s private investments and hedge funds held shares in Box, according to the filing, which noted that the firm had the option to purchase up to 1.25 million shares of stock in the IPO at the offering price. Those shares would be subject to a 180-day lockup.
Christopher Hansen’s San Francisco–based Valiant Capital Partners has also been busy on the private side. The firm now manages about $590 million in side pockets, which is what it calls the firm’s private investments, or nearly one quarter of the firm’s total assets of $2.44 billion.
In the fourth quarter alone, Hansen made three new investments, according to the firm’s fourth-quarter letter to clients. Hansen’s firm invested $38.5 million in Instacart, a grocery delivery company headquartered in San Francisco. Hansen stressed that Instacart is not one of the online grocery deliverers from the late 1990s, which were saddled with expensive trucks, warehouses and high-wage union drivers.
“This business model is relatively capital-lite and allows for favorable relationships with grocery chains,” Hansen explained, adding that Instacart does not operate supply-chain infrastructure or hold inventory.
Hansen also invested $20 million in FreeCharge, which Hansen describes as an Indian online payments platform that enables customers to earn coupons when they pay on the Internet or with mobile devices.
His largest new private deal in the fourth quarter was a $17.9 million investment in Uber Technologies, the taxi and car-sharing service accessed via a cell phone app that has become the rage and that is not without controversy. “We believe that Uber represents a fundamental disruption of the existing global for-hire transportation infrastructure and has positioned itself to capitalize on the lucrative opportunity to restructure the transportation marketplace globally,” Hansen told clients in his fourth-quarter letter.
Uber, in fact, has attracted a fair amount of attention from the Tiger Cub crowd. We reported in December that Greenwich, Connecticut–based Glade Brook Capital Partners has launched Glade Brook Private Investors V, a new private fund designed to invest in one stock: Uber. Glade Brook raised at least $141.5 million for the fund.
Even Stephen Mandel Jr.’s Lone Pine Capital invested in Uber even though it rarely gets involved with private companies.
Of course, the largest investor in private companies is Tiger Global Management, which manages $7.5 billion on the venture capital side. The firm’s venture capital business is run by Scott Shleifer, who started it, and Lee Fixel.
In the fourth quarter alone, Tiger Global made at least nine private investments and nearly 50 in 2014. Meanwhile, shares of one of its earlier private holdings, OnDeck Capital, which went public in mid-December at $20 per share, have fallen to $15.52 after surging following the IPO.
