Falcon Edge Capital led the latest $225 million Series F financing for OlaCabs, an Indian rival to Uber Technologies, according to published reports. Other investors include New York-based Tiger Global Management and Steadview Capital, a Hong Kong-based hedge fund. New York–based Falcon Edge, founded in 2012 by Richard Gerson, and a so-called Tiger Grandcub because he was previously a founding executive at John Griffin’s New York–based Blue Ridge Capital, has now invested roughly $78 million in Ola, according to iamwire.com, which provides information on technology, digital business, and digital culture in India. This is at least the fifth investment in Ola made by Tiger Global, according to crunchbase.com. At the time of the Tiger Cub’s most recent semi-annual letter to investors in its private funds dated July 31, Ola was its second-largest investment. Three of its nine funds has invested $83 million and owned 19 percent of the company, which was prior to the latest financing. “To date, Ola has executed extremely well and is the dominant market leader,” said the Tiger Global report.
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Sandell Asset Management nominated a slate of six directors to the board of furniture retailer Ethan Allen, which includes Richard Mansouri, a managing director at Sandell. The New York activist, which first described its case for the company at Institutional Investor and CNBC’s Delivering Alpha conference in July, owns 5.5 percent of the shares. Other nominees include Alex Wolf, a former partner/managing director at Cerberus Capital Management. In a press release, Sandell reiterated that Ethan Allen’s stock has underperformed its peers and calls chairman and CEO Farooq Kathwari an “imperial CEO.” Sandell also cites what it believes is poor governance, a stale and entrenched board.
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Preqin’s All-Strategies Hedge Fund benchmark lost 1.88 percent in August and is now down 1.96 percent for the year-to-date. The worst performers last month were equity strategies, down 3.08 percent, activist funds, off 3.41 percent and the Preqin Asia-Pacific benchmark, down 3.68 percent. Even so, these losses were much smaller than the major indexes, which lost between 6 percent and 7 percent. Strategies that gained last month include macro, up 0.59 percent, and relative value, up 0.13 percent, according to the London-based company.
