Afew years ago SoftBank rewrote the rules of venture capital (vc). The Japanese tech conglomerate was handing out cash left and right to startup founders. Leading venture capitalists held conferences to discuss how their industry could survive the SoftBank onslaught. As some of SoftBank’s biggest investments unravelled, culminating in the collapse in September 2019 of the initial public offering (ipo) of WeWork, an office-sharing firm, Valley veterans gloated. It seemed to be just another “tourist investor”, as one vc luminary dubs those who occasionally traipse through Silicon Valley looking to pick up sexy startups.

Now SoftBank is being upstaged by another brash outsider. Between January and May Tiger Global Management, a New York hedge fund that also invests in private tech firms, ploughed money into 118 startups, ten times more than it backed in the same period in 2020, according to Crunchbase, a data provider. Its portfolio now counts more than 400 firms, including several behind some of the past year’s most eye-catching ipos, for example Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and Roblox, a video-game maker. And, as it told investors in February, it is “searching for ways to make our investment flywheel spin faster”. Its new vehicle aims to raise an additional $10bn. That may be less than SoftBank’s gargantuan $100bn Vision Fund, but it is still an awful lot by vc standards—and the New Yorker may leave a more enduring mark on Silicon Valley than its deep-pocketed Japanese rival has.