In the summer of 2019, George Raymond Zage III, founder and CEO of Singapore-based Tiga Investments, got an urgent call from an investor pal in Los Angeles, James Lu. Grindr, the popular dating app for the LGBTQ community, was being put on the block by its Chinese owner, gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech, because of U.S. security concerns—specifically, its access to potentially compromising data on Americans. Lu wanted to know if Zage would be willing to help raise a fund to buy it. The clock was ticking with the deadline for the forced sale set for June 2020.
After Lu, a former NASA software engineer and cofounder of a tech buyout firm, dropped some key stats on the then-decade-old global app, Zage made a snap decision. “No, I’m not going to help you raise a fund,” he told Lu. “We’re going to go do this deal.” A couple of details had piqued his interest, Zage recalls in an exclusive interview with Forbes Asia in late August. Grindr’s Ebitda numbers (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) were low despite very good user engagement and there was a clear view on how to improve the product to goose the bottom line.
Lu flew to Tokyo where Zage was attending a meeting and the two mapped out a strategy over drinks at the Imperial Hotel’s whisky bar on how to pull it off. That October, Zage signed on American serial entrepreneur J. Michael Gearon Jr. during a flight from San Francisco to Atlanta, whom he had worked with over a decade earlier to profitably develop telecom tower businesses in Indonesia and Myanmar. The trio set up San Vicente Acquisition, named after the West Hollywood street where Grindr’s HQ is located, with Zage’s privately held Tiga owning 54% in the joint venture.
It was just the type of deal for which Zage was known. “My focus has always been on special situations,” the 55-year-old says, so-called because they have some element of complexity or timing requirements. The new partners fended off other bidders to buy the app within the deadline for $608 million.
Two years later, Grindr merged with Zage’s blank check company Tiga Acquisition in a transaction valued at $2.1 billion, to take it public on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock surged over 200% when it listed in November 2022, landing Zage with his 43% stake in the three-comma club (after accounting for pledged shares.) While Grindr’s stock has corrected by more than half since the frothy listing, it’s earned him a spot among Singapore’s 50 richest and still accounts for the bulk of his $1.5 billion fortune today. Zage currently holds 50% of the company while Lu and Gearon own 14% and 6%, respectively.
Being at the right place at the right time might have helped seal the Grindr deal, but Zage was the right guy. The former investment banker at Goldman Sachs spent 18 years at U.S. hedge fund Farallon Capital Management successfully overseeing its Asian division from Singapore before setting up Tiga Investments in 2017. Now the dealmaker—who earned a reputation as the king of leveraged buyouts—has flipped the script to take a longer term, hands-on approach to investing on his own account, powering corporate turnarounds as a borrower rather than lender.
“[Grindr] was the chance to take everything that I had learned over the previous two decades investing and put it all to work in a single transaction.”
“Since starting Tiga, there has been a lot of value creation with the use of credit, but the user of credit has been me,” the self-confessed “deal junkie” acknowledges. He’s seated comfortably in a plush conference room of premium flexible workspace provider The Executive Centre (TEC), a Tiga-backed company that Zage sees as his next fortune-maker as it closes in on listing its India unit after recently filing a preliminary prospectus with the country’s securities regulator.
And there is other potential gold in the offing. Over the past eight years, Zage has quietly expanded Tiga’s eclectic portfolio, which spans a drone-tracking company, a smartphone tech business and a fantasy sports platform, among others. But its biggest bet by far is Grindr, which Zage says has also given him the biggest returns. He puts the value of Tiga’s investments at around $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion, a range, he says, that largely depends on Grindr’s share price.
“[Grindr] was the chance to take everything that I had learned over the previous two decades investing and put it all to work in a single transaction,” observes Zage. The U.S.-expat-turned-Singapore citizen says what likely helped the partners clinch the deal was the $10 million upfront deposit they gave Kunlun as guarantee, confident that they could bag the needed approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
Then came Covid-19, which Zage says hit them hard as discussions with all lenders save one fell apart. Kunlun, founded by Chinese billionaire Zhou Yahui, extended a deferred payment plan for $255 million that filled the financing gap beyond the expensive loan they managed to secure, with Zage and Lu pledging their San Vicente shares as collateral to get the buyout done.
Since its listing, Grindr’s largely refreshed board, chaired by Lu, and its management team, led by CEO George Arison, appointed a month before the company went public, have been expanding their scope in the $8.3 billion (2025 est. revenue) global dating services market, per Statista. “There is considerable growth opportunity because this is really a social [and dating] app,” says Zage, who also sits on the board.
To this end, Grindr has been tapping AI while of late positioning itself as “the Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket,” with more features such as Roam, an in-app purchase that allows members to make connections outside their region. It also offers premium versions of the free app via tiered-subscriptions, with expanded settings like ad-free browsing, chat translation and unsending messages.
Last year sales jumped by a third to $345 million from a year earlier as the number of Grindr’s monthly active users hit over 14 million worldwide. Adjusted Ebitda grew by a third over the period to $147 million, though the company saw its net loss widen to $131 million due to a non-cash loss from the change in fair value of its warrant liability. In February it completed the redemption of all public and private warrants.
The outlook for Grindr “is great,” says Lu, 43, pointing to an Ebitda margin of 43% and double-digit sales growth year-on-year for the quarter ended June. That compares favorably with dating app giants Bumble’s 38% Ebitda margin and an 8% revenue decline, and Tinder-owner Match Group’s 34% adjusted operating income margin and flat top-line growth.
Over the next five years, Grindr’s revenue is pegged to rise an annualized 19% in line with the company’s expanding product range and ad partnerships, wrote John Blackledge, senior equity research analyst at TD Cowen in an August report. He also noted the potential of localized versions of the app in international markets, which accounted for over 40% of revenue last year.
It was during the pandemic that Zage got wind of another deal, and in true Zage fashion, he acted fast. In June 2021, Tiga, together with the credit team at private equity giant KKR, bought out TEC’s investors HPEF Capital Partners (formerly HSBC Private Equity) and CVC Capital Partners for an undisclosed sum. Zage scooped up the largest stake, owning just over half of the workspace operator’s parent company, while Ashish Gupta, a former Farallon executive who is Tiga’s managing director, and TEC founder and CEO Paul Salnikoff picked up smaller shares, he says.
“The transaction and the structure of the deal that KKR did look very similar to something that I might have done at Farallon as a lender. It’s just that, in this case, I was a borrower, and KKR helped us buy a controlling stake,” explains Zage. Founded in 1994, Hong Kong-headquartered TEC, which operates in 15 markets including mainland China, Singapore, India, the UAE and Australia, had gone through four rounds of private equity funding before Zage entered its orbit in 2021.
Just two years earlier, a deal that reportedly valued the company at $750 million was shelved amid anti-government protests in Hong Kong. Then came the implosion of SoftBank-backed coworking giant WeWork, triggered by hefty losses, a spiked IPO and a dramatic drop in valuation. To round it off: early pandemic restrictions saw office use plummet.
Says Salnikoff, “Between the euphoria of the first half of 2019 and 2021, market conditions had changed fundamentally and the valuations did as well,” adding that TEC “suddenly became a really good deal.” By some estimates, the value of the business was marked down by 50%. (Salnikoff increased his stake in 2021 alongside Tiga and KKR’s investment). “Ray is a contra-cyclical investor, he looks for great assets that have, for whatever reason, a knockdown on the price,” notes Salnikoff, who credits his chemistry with Zage as pivotal to negotiations, with both aligned that TEC would be a long-term investment.
“We bought at a point in time where Ebitda was down because of Covid,” says Zage. “The business has recovered incredibly well.” He adds that Singapore, where it has ten locations, is TEC’s most profitable operation. In July, TEC’s Executive Centre India, a unit that includes newly consolidated operations in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, announced preliminary listing plans. The company intends to use the estimated $300 million in proceeds to finance internal restructuring and pare down debt.
This could mean another windfall for Zage. The flexible office space market is on an uptick, with occupancy rates for TEC India hovering at over 90% for the past three years and surpassing that of its listed rivals, Awfis Space Solutions and Smartworks Coworking Spaces for fiscal 2024, according to its preliminary prospectus. In the year ended March, TEC India’s total income climbed 28% to 13.5 billion rupees ($152 million). While Ebitda rose 22% to 7.1 billion rupees, its net loss widened to 806 million rupees amid intensifying competition, notes Vivek Rathi, national director of research at Knight Frank India. Still, he adds, “the flexible workspace market in India is poised for sustained growth.”
Zage is optimistic: “There’s an engine room of business development on expansion opportunities” at TEC, buoyed by “very strong blue-chip clients.”
Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, Zage used to help his dentist father with the family’s investment portfolio. In his early teens, he devoured Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, he says, in addition to spending hours manually plotting out share price movements of some 40 companies his dad was following. Since his father died 25 years ago, his mother has been living off the portfolio, which includes American blue-chips Apple and Amgen. “[My father] always used to say…I go to my job every day as a dentist, but I make more money investing,” remembers Zage, himself married to his college sweetheart and a father of two.
After graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a finance and accounting degree, Zage kick-started his career at Goldman Sachs in New York City, making a pit stop in Los Angeles before being assigned to the investment bank’s Singapore office. In 2000, at age 30 he joined Farallon, established by American billionaire Tom Steyer, to manage the firm’s Asian investments, first from San Francisco and London before returning to Singapore two years later to set up the hedge fund’s Asian outpost.
Zage’s independent thinking and penchant for reading footnotes in financial reports left a lasting impression on his then-Goldman Sachs colleague Andrew Spokes, now the executive chair of Farallon—as did Zage’s recordkeeping. “He believed in a paper-based filing system. Both his desk and its surround-ings were piled many feet high with prospectuses, research reports, memos and other paper,” Spokes shares via email. “To the uninitiated it looked like chaos, but he always knew where to find the crucial document from many months in the past.”
As Farallon’s Asia hand, Zage showcased his finesse in clinching and managing distressed assets, working with family businesses and entrepreneurs in the region to help them “pick up the pieces of everything that had gone wrong during the Asian financial crisis,” he says. “And so my investing mindset from early on was always oriented around working with people and trying to fix things that were broken or just trying to be opportunistic.”
“My investing mindset from early on was always oriented around working with people and trying to fix things that were broken or just trying to be opportunistic.”
Among his high-profile deals, nearly all a mix of debt and equity investments, were Indonesian ride-hailing app Gojek (before it merged with e-commerce player Tokopedia in 2021) and Singapore’s Garena, the predecessor of internet giant Sea, founded by billionaire Forrest Li. But one stole the show. Bank Central Asia (BCA) “was really an incredibly transformational transaction, both for Indonesia at the time, but also for me professionally.”
Farallon, along with Central Java-based Djarum Group, owned by Indonesia’s billionaire brothers R. Budi and Michael Hartono, bested Standard Chartered Bank in 2002 to buy a controlling 51% stake in BCA for $540 million from the Indonesian government in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Farallon eventually cashed out, reaping a substantial gain, and BCA went on to become the country’s largest lender by market value. The brothers’ majority stake now accounts for the bulk of their combined $38 billion fortune.
More deals flowed, including investments in BTS Group Holdings, which operates part of Bangkok’s mass transit system and Semen Indonesia (Persero), Indonesia’s largest cement company. They also drew the notice of the region’s heavyweights, like Malaysian billionaire and business legend Robert Kuok, whom Zage recounts having a five-hour meeting with in the mid-2000s.
Zage left Farallon to strike out on his own with Tiga, its name based on the Bahasa Indonesian word tiga, which means three, to denote the third act of his career. By then his roots were firmly planted in Singapore, where he became a permanent resident in 2006 and then a citizen four years later. “If you’re really going to anchor your life around a country, at some point, you should sign up for the system that you’re a part of,” says Zage, who now sits on the advisory board of an investment arm of the country’s Economic Development Board.
Spokes says that having his own firm allowed Zage “to make some intelligent but riskier investments that we might have passed on at Farallon.” To date, Zage says Tiga has invested in roughly a dozen companies based largely in Asia and North America, many globally operated, such as WhiteFox Defense Technologies, a U.S.-based company that specializes in drone detection for airspace security, and Cosmose AI, a Singapore-based firm that has partnered with smartphone makers like Xiaomi and OPPO on its lock-screen technology.
There have been some bumps along the way, Zage admits. A recent investment in Indian fantasy sports company Dream11 hit a wall in August. “The government just shut down all money gaming related [online] ventures, which has been a huge blow, ” says Zage. “But I don’t think the business is going away. They’re going to have to reposition the business and find other ways to make money.”
In September, Grindr was targeted by short seller Ningi Research, which made several accusations against the company, saying its pursuit of an aggressive monetization strategy could erode the business long-term. A Grindr spokesperson refuted the report, calling it inaccurate, and added that the company is “confident in our business.”
Zage’s deliberate pivot to longer-term equity investing with Tiga has allowed him to follow more personal passions. Its small stake in Hart Davis Hart Auction, the largest wine auction business in the U.S., for one, is a chance to immerse himself in the world of fine and rare wines. The bulk of Tiga’s portfolio, he says, consists of smaller bets, with stakes ranging between 10% and 30%. “These are acorns that could be oak trees.”