The Morning Brief: Tiger Cubs Back Uber Competitor

Two Tiger Cubs have made bets on one of Uber’s competitors. Charles (Chase) Coleman III’s New York-based Tiger Global Management and Philippe Laffont’s New York-based Coatue Management were among the investors in GrabTaxi’s $350 million Series E financing. The Singapore-based company, which enables customers to call a taxi with a smartphone, specializes in southeast Asia, mostly Singapore, Malaysia and The Philippines. Coatue, which led the latest financing, was a previous investor, as was Tiger Global, according to crunchbase.com. China Investment Corp. and SoftBank also participated in the latest financing.

We recently reported that Tiger Global’s venture capital arm has invested in four competitors of Uber in nations where the company is not dominant: Ola in India, DiDi Kuaidi in China, 99Taxis in Brazil and GrabTaxi. “The industry is evolving rapidly and these are still early-stage businesses that must execute,” Tiger Global told clients of its private funds in a recent letter.

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UBS raised its price target on hedge fund favorite Netflix from $116 to $143. In a report sent to clients Wednesday, the investment bank says it lifted its target after raising its long-term revenue estimates due to its belief the streaming media company “will successfully monetize its global scaled streaming platform beyond just monthly subscription fees, such as bundling/promoting third party services.” At the end of the second quarter, Tiger Global was the third-largest investor, while New York–based SRS Investment Management was the ninth-largest investor. SRS was founded in 2007 by Karthik Ramakrishna Sarma, who worked for Tiger Global for five years.

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The volatile shares of Etsy dropped another 5.5 percent on Wednesday and are now down nearly 14 percent over the past two days. We noted yesterday that various investment vehicles operated by Tiger Global own 9 percent of the online crafts company.

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