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........

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