Coatue Management

• 1. Introduction

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  Coatue Management LLC hosts an annual gathering called East Meets West. There, technology entrepreneurs from the United States and China trade notes on where the industry is heading. It's an unusual habit for a firm that otherwise spends its days managing money rather than convening founders. Who built an investment firm global enough to pull in entrepreneurs from two of the world's largest tech economies? And what convinced that firm to move beyond a single hedge fund into private equity, growth investing, and dozens of technology bets at once?

• 2. From MIT To Tiger Management

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  Philippe Laffont graduated from MIT in 1989 with a degree in computer science. McKinsey & Company hired him as an analyst from 1992 to 1994, and he was based in Madrid, Spain. He worked briefly as an independent consultant before Tiger Management LLC brought him on as a research analyst in 1996. There, Laffont focused on European telecommunications stocks, sharpening the technology focus that would carry into his own firm. That grounding in Tiger Management's research bench would soon put Laffont in position to start something of his own.

• 3. Founding Coatue

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  In 1999, Laffont founded Coatue, joining the ranks of the Tiger Cubs, former Tiger Management employees who went on to start their own hedge funds. The new firm launched its first hedge fund that year with $45 million in capital. Coatue still manages that fund today alongside others it has since added. Thomas Laffont came aboard as co-founder, taking charge of Coatue's private equity investing. Today Coatue works across public and private markets, concentrating on technology, media and telecommunications alongside the consumer and healthcare sectors. Its offices now reach from New York City and Menlo Park, California to London, Shanghai and Hong Kong. That international footprint would need serious capital behind it, capital raised one fund at a time in the years that followed.

• 4. Raising Bigger Funds

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  Coatue Private Fund I LP opened in 2013 with $300 million in committed capital. It marked the start of Coatue's family of dedicated private funds. Two years later, Coatue Private Fund II LP followed with $500 million committed. Coatue Kona III LP arrived in 2017, carrying $1,300 million in committed capital. In 2019, the Coatue Early Stage Fund LP raised $700 million to back companies earlier in their growth. The largest of the group, Coatue Growth Fund IV LP, closed in 2020 with $3,500 million committed. It stands as the biggest single raise in the firm's fund lineup by far. All of that committed capital ultimately flowed into a specific portfolio of companies across those funds.

• 5. A Global Portfolio

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  Coatue's investments include Airtable, Ant Financial, Anthropic and Anaplan. They also include ByteDance, Chime, Dapper Labs and Databricks, then DoorDash, Instacart and Meituan, and finally OpenSea, Snap Inc., SoFi, Spotify and UiPath. Sixteen companies make up that named portion of Coatue's portfolio. UiPath closes out that list, but it is unlikely to be the last name Coatue adds as the technology landscape keeps shifting.