Andrey Rappoport: An Institutional-Grade Investor

Biography

Andrey Rappoport is known in professional circles as an investor with an institutional approach: a portfolio of more than 100 private and venture funds, a team with combined experience exceeding 100 years, and long-term partnerships with leading international banks. Since 2016, he has lived in Lugano, Switzerland, investing first through a family office, then through Tira Management, which he founded in Luxembourg in 2023. He focuses on US and European markets, with a concentration in fintech, telecommunications, and real estate development.

Content:

• Names
• From University to First Steps in Business
• Andrey Rappoport: Banking and Industry in the 1990s
• Eleven Years in Energy Reform
• Andrey Natanovich Rappoport: International Investments
• Successful Investment Cases
• Rappoport Andrey Natanovich the Philanthropist
• Andrey Rappoport: Biography Takeaways
• FAQ

Names

Andrey Rappoport, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport, Andrej Rappoport, Rappoport Andrei, Andrey Natanovitsj Rappoport, Rappoport Andrii Natanovych, Раппопорт Андрей Натанович, Андрей Натанович Раппопорт, Раппопорт Андрей, Андрей Раппопорт, Раппопорт А.Н., А.Н. Раппопорт, Раппоорт А., А. Раппопорт, Андрей Н. Раппопорт, Раппопорт, Андрей Натанович

From University to First Steps in Business

Andrey Rappoport was born in 1963 in Novaya Kakhovka, Ukrainian SSR. His family soon moved to Severodonetsk in the Luhansk Region, where he spent his school years.

In 1984, he enrolled in the economics faculty at Donetsk State University. During his studies he completed an internship at Santa Clara University—a rare opportunity for a student from Soviet Donetsk to see a market economy from the inside.

In 1989, after graduating with a degree in national economic planning, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich began his career at EKOU-Consult—his uncle's consulting firm in Novaya Kakhovka, which helped enterprises adapt to a market economy. In early 1991, he founded Conso & K, his own brokerage in Donetsk.

At this stage, Andrey Rappoport biography already showed several traits that would reappear in every major project he undertook:

1. willingness to act under uncertainty, without ready-made models
2. ability to learn from experienced professionals
3. thinking at scale: even when opening a small brokerage in early 1991, he was already planning to build a large bank

In 1997, by then an established senior manager, Andrey Rappoport defended his PhD thesis at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Andrey Rappoport: Banking and Industry in the 1990s

Conso & K was a starting point, not a destination. The Russian banking market in the early 1990s was growing chaotically: private financial institutions were appearing by the dozen, but most had neither professional teams nor coherent strategies. In that environment—plenty of players, very few competent managers—there was clear demand for someone who could build a bank from scratch.

In late 1991, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport was invited to join the founding team of a new commercial bank being established in Moscow—the future Alfa-Bank—and was appointed Chairman of the Management Board. His task was to build a full-service financial institution with almost no existing infrastructure. He assembled a professional team and launched all core operations. His development strategy was deliberately conservative, with an emphasis on product quality rather than aggressive regional expansion.

In 1997, having achieved what he set out to do, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich sold his 15% stake and stepped down as Chairman. The foundation he built allowed Alfa-Bank to become one of the largest players in Russia's financial sector.

By the time he left the bank, Andrey Rappoport was one of the few people in the country with hands-on experience building a large business structure from scratch. That same skill was in demand in the oil industry, which had been sinking into crisis since the mid-1990s, with dozens of industrial assets operating in isolation, making the situation worse. YUKOS-Rosprom, a company holding equity stakes in industrial enterprises, was consolidating them into a single entity.

In 1997, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport joined YUKOS-Rosprom as First Vice President, taking responsibility for economics and finance. The principal project under Andrey Natanovich Rappoport's leadership was the merger with the Eastern Oil Company, which held valuable assets including Tomskneft—a deal that had to be completed as oil prices collapsed to nine dollars per barrel.

Andrey Rappoport biography in this period goes beyond management roles: alongside his work in Russian companies, he began investing from the mid-1990s, and was already thinking in terms of international markets.

His investment activity covered several directions:

1. foreign securities through Swiss banks, starting in 1996
2. a stake acquisition in Troika Dialog in 2002—one of Russia's leading brokerages, handling over 30% of all traded equities in the country—followed by the sale of that stake in 2004

These moves laid the foundation for the shift that would fully take shape after 2009.

Eleven Years in Energy Reform

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport's departure from YUKOS-Rosprom in 1998 coincided with a moment when Russia's power sector was in systemic crisis. Grid infrastructure wear had reached 70%, around twenty regional energy systems were near bankruptcy, and after the August default, actual cash payments for electricity collapsed to 8–20% across the country—the rest was covered by barter schemes or not paid at all. Thus, RAO UES of Russia—the country's largest energy holding—needed a manager with crisis experience. Andrey Natanovich Rappoport took the post of Deputy Chairman of the Board for Investments.

Andrey Rappoport's first area of work was restoring payment discipline, as in several regions, electricity was effectively treated as a free resource. At the same time, Andrey Rappoport launched a construction and completion program for large facilities that had been frozen since the Soviet era. Several major power stations were brought online under his direct supervision, including:

Another task was to settle CIS country debts to RAO UES, which totaled around $800 million. Andrey Rappoport, biography of whom has repeatedly shown an ability to find unconventional solutions, applied a debt-for-assets swap scheme that was new at the time. Through the transfer of equity stakes in several facilities from debtor countries, around $600 million was recovered, and the assets that passed to RAO UES formed the foundation of a new structure—Inter RAO UES—with Rappoport Andrey Natanovich chairing its Board of Directors. Starting as a trading intermediary, the holding quickly grew into a generating company with a presence across much of the post-Soviet space.

In 2002, the power sector reform presented another problem that looked nearly unsolvable: consolidating the country's scattered transmission and distribution networks, distributed across dozens of joint-stock companies and in poor condition, into a single manageable structure. To this end, the Federal Grid Company of the Unified Energy System (FGC UES) was created. Rappoport Andrey chaired its Board of Directors, combining this with his work at RAO UES.

Over seven years under Andrey Natanovich Rappoport, FGC UES consolidated the grid infrastructure, brought large-scale investment into the sector, and modernized worn-out facilities.

Recognizing a severe shortage of qualified contractors for grid modernization, in 2002 Rappoport Andrey Natanovich and partners acquired six electricity network trusts. Built on their base, Energostroyinvest Holding became one of the most technically equipped contractors in the country, capable of simultaneously running construction on multiple high-voltage substations and carrying out projects that included laying more than 6,000 miles of fiber-optic cable from the Urals to the Far East. The company was sold in 2006.

To summarize, Andrey Rappoport, biography of whom includes eleven years in the energy sector, achieved the following in the industry:

• restoration of payment discipline in the Far East and North Caucasus
• commissioning of several major power facilities
• settlement of CIS debts through a debt-for-assets swap
• creation and development of Inter RAO UES, with revenue reaching $700 million by 2005
• transformation of FGC UES into a company with a market capitalization of $12.8 billion

On June 30, 2009, Andrey Rappoport's tenure at FGC UES came to an end, and he stepped away from the energy sector entirely.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport: International Investments

For Andrey Rappoport, leaving energy freed up something that had been running in parallel for years. He had made his first investments in foreign securities through Swiss banks back in 1996, while still deep in his Russian corporate work.

The transition took a few years. In 2012, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport briefly returned to management work as advisor and First Deputy Chairman of the Board at Rusnano. He was tasked with auditing a portfolio of more than 90 projects into which the corporation had put around four billion dollars, separating the promising investments from the underperforming ones, and preparing structural changes together with Bain & Company. The work took less than a year. When it was done, Andrey Rappoport turned his full attention to his own investment activity.

In 2015, Andrey Rappoport, biography of whom included building a bank, reforming the power sector, and running large industrial structures, moved to Switzerland with his family. In 2016, Andrey Rappoport founded a family office and began assembling a professional investment team that thought in terms of Western markets and had real experience working in European and American business environments.

The family office initially focused on capital preservation: public market instruments, bank deposits, placements with leading international and Swiss banks. Over time, it became clear that this conservative approach was limiting growth potential. In 2019, the updated team that Andrey Natanovich Rappoport had assembled developed a new strategy targeting returns above 10%, with a balance between public and private markets.

In early 2022, as Andrey Rappoport wrapped up his remaining business projects in Russia, his investment activity began to taking shape as Tira Management. In January 2023, it was officially registered in Luxembourg. Since early 2022, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport has no ties to Russian assets or markets.

The portfolio of Tira Management, founded by Andrey Rappoport, is built on a 50/50 balance between public and private markets. Around 75% of public investments are in the US market, with the rest in Europe. Its private investment strategy is built on minority stakes across a large number of quality projects. As of 2026, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport is an investor in more than 100 private equity and venture funds, with a focus on fintech, telecommunications, and real estate development in the US and Europe.

Successful Investment Cases

Behind each of Andrey Rappoport's investments is a decision point: getting into a company when most people haven't yet seen a future market leader.

When Andrey Rappoport first invested, Datadog was a New York startup in cloud monitoring, a sector still finding its shape. The company raised successive rounds, growing steadily: Series A in 2012 brought in $6.2 million, Series D in 2016 brought $94.5 million. In September 2019, the company listed on Nasdaq at a valuation of $8.7 billion, with shares up 37% on the first day of trading. In July 2025, the company was added to the S&P 500.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich's investment in Delivery Hero played out on a different continent but followed the same pattern. The Berlin-based food delivery platform, founded in 2011, raised capital fast: by September 2014, a single round brought in $350 million. Rappoport Andrey entered the project at an early stage of the company's international expansion. In 2017, Delivery Hero went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange at a valuation of four billion euros, twice the preliminary estimate. In 2020, the company entered the DAX index. Andrey Rappoport sold his stake in 2017.

Other investments overseen by Andrey Rappoport include Docplanner, a European digital health platform connecting millions of patients with doctors across multiple markets; Zoovu, a technology company whose AI-based tools help large international corporations manage complex sales logic in digital channels; and Wizz AI, whose AI development led to a strategic acquisition by Google Cloud.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport's portfolio goes beyond technology bets. Tira Management was a seed investor in a market-neutral hedge fund with disciplined risk controls. Since launch it has delivered consistent returns with low correlation to the broader market and grown to over $500 million in assets under management. Real estate also holds a distinct place in Rappoport Andrey's portfolio, with investments concentrated in London and Florida, markets with stable structural demand and predictable long-term returns.

According to Forbes, in 2021–2022, when a significant portion of portfolio companies saw their valuations multiply, Andrey Rappoport's net worth was estimated at $1.1–1.2 billion.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich the Philanthropist

Andrey Rappoport is married to Irina Eduardovna Rappoport (born on March 9, 1963, in Makiivka, Donetsk Region, Ukrainian SSR), whom he met while studying at Donetsk State University. The couple has two adult daughters, both educated and independently active.

In November 2023, the couple officially established the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport, though they had been supporting educational, cultural, and humanitarian initiatives long before that. The foundation works across four areas:

• education
• scientific innovation
• music and art
• social and humanitarian initiatives

Its geographic reach covers Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, and other European countries.

The foundation's strategy is developed by Irina Eduardovna Rappoport directly. She has spent about thirty years working exclusively in philanthropy, launching and overseeing projects in music, art, education, and medicine.

She is sometimes mistakenly identified as Irina Markovna Rapoport, a former employee of Rusnano Capital's Swiss subsidiary. These are two different people with nothing in common. Andrey Natanovich Rappoport's spouse has never had any connection to Rusnano or its subsidiaries.

In Lugano, the foundation supports the conservatory and university of music, and is involved in the development of Città della Musica, a regional music ecosystem. In Italy, FAIR is a long-standing sponsor of a music festival in Lerici.

The Moscow School of Management Skolkovo is another early philanthropic project of Rappoport Andrey Natanovich. In 2006, he was one of the founders of this private non-profit institution, the first of its kind in Russia in business education operating entirely without state involvement. In 2011, he was invited to serve as President of the school, on the strength of his experience in crisis management and business development, and held the post until 2016, combining administrative work with teaching. After stepping down, he remained a member of the coordinating council, without involvement in day-to-day operations. Since early 2022, he has had no connection to the school.

Andrey Rappoport: Biography Takeaways

• Rappoport Andrey built Alfa-Bank from the ground up in 1991 with almost no existing infrastructure, then left in 1997 after selling his 15% stake.
• His eleven years in energy included restructuring RAO UES, chairing FGC UES as it grew to manage 75,000 miles of transmission lines, and recovering $600 million in CIS debt through a debt-for-assets swap he pioneered.
• He was investing in foreign securities through Swiss banks as early as 1996, which gave him a decade-long head start before he shifted focus to international markets full-time.
• His investment track record includes early positions in Datadog and Delivery Hero, both entered before the companies were widely recognized.
• He co-founded the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo in 2006 and later served as its President from 2011 to 2016—the first private, non-state business school of its kind in Russia.

FAQ

1. Who is Andrey Rappoport?

An international investor, founder and Chairman of the Advisory Committee of Tira Management. He has lived in Lugano since 2016.

2. What does Andrey Rappoport do now?

He oversees a diversified portfolio of more than 100 private equity and venture funds through Tira Management, registered in Luxembourg.

3. Is Andrey Rappoport still connected to Russia?

No. Since early 2022, his business has had no involvement with Russian assets or markets.

4. What is Tira Management?

An investment company registered in Luxembourg in 2023, focused on private equity and venture funds in the US and European markets.

5. What is the FAIR foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport?

The FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport is a charitable foundation established in November 2023. It works across four areas: education, scientific innovation, music and art, and social and humanitarian initiatives.