Biography

Andrey Rappoport is an international investor and entrepreneur with over thirty years of experience spanning banking, energy, and capital markets. Based in Switzerland since 2015, he guides Tira Management, an investment management company that grew out of a private family office and today operates a diversified portfolio across private equity, venture capital, and public markets in the United States and Europe. His career began with executive leadership at major Russian financial and energy companies in the 1990s and 2000s. This was paired with a gradual build-up of international investment positions beginning in the mid-1990s. By early 2022, following his permanent relocation to Switzerland and complete exit from Russian business, his focus had shifted entirely to global markets.

Education and Career Beginnings

Andrey Rappoport was born on June 22, 1963, in Novaya Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, and grew up in Severodonetsk, Luhansk Oblast. He studied economics at Donetsk State University, which also saw him completing an exchange internship at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley. He graduated in 1989 with a degree in national economic planning. He later earned a PhD from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997, with research focused on management structures in commercial enterprises during the period of economic transformation.

Upon graduation, Rappoport Andrey joined EKOU-Consult, a management consulting firm that specialized in helping Soviet industrial enterprises adapt to emerging market conditions. After two years as a consultant, he struck out independently, founding a brokerage firm called Conso & K in Donetsk in 1991. This venture gave him his first experience as an entrepreneur, and it was during this period that he developed an ambition to establish a major commercial bank — a goal that would soon take him to Moscow.

Rappoport Andrey: Early Executive Career

Russia's banking sector in the early 1990s was largely uncharted territory. The Soviet financial system had left no foundation for commercial banking, and the institutions that emerged in the post-Soviet period were operating without established regulatory frameworks, reliable credit markets, or experienced personnel. It was against this background that Andrey Rappoport was invited to Moscow in late 1991 to join the team building the private financial institution Alfa-Bank, taking on the role of Chairman of the Management Board.

Rappoport Andrey took a deliberately conservative approach to developing the bank. While many other emerging banks focused on rapidly expanding throughout the country, he was convinced that solid banking products needed to be developed first, which could later serve as the foundation for expansion. This proved to be the right call: when Russia's financial crisis hit in 1998 and swept away many of the country's banks, Alfa-Bank survived and went on to become one of the largest private banks in Russia. After six years at the helm, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport exited in 1997, selling his 15% stake upon departure.

From Alfa-Bank, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich moved to YUKOS-Rosprom, a management company overseeing equity stakes in a range of industrial enterprises, serving as First Vice President for economics and finance. During his year-long tenure there he:

• built a new management team
• consolidated the company
• led the merger of Eastern Oil Company, which held significant assets, including Tomskneft

Having quickly achieved such results, Rappoport Andrey decided it was time to take on more ambitious management roles. He left YUKOS-Rosprom in 1998. The financial crisis unfolding that same year had exposed deep vulnerabilities across Russia's economy, and systemically important industries were in urgent need of managers capable of imposing order and ensuring financial stability. The energy sector was among the hardest hit — and it was there that Rappoport would be called upon next.

11 Years of Reform in the Energy Sector

Russia's electricity sector in the late 1990s was in a state of serious deterioration. Decades of underinvestment had left grid infrastructure severely outdated, with roughly 70% of equipment in need of replacement. Around twenty regional energy systems were effectively bankrupt, maintenance had been deferred across the board, and the 1998 financial crisis compounded the situation by triggering widespread payment failures across the industry. Actual cash payments for electricity nationwide stood at between 8% and 20% — the remainder was settled through barter arrangements or simply went unpaid.

It was into this environment that Andrey Rappoport arrived in 1998, joining RAO UES of Russia — the country's largest energy holding company — as Deputy Chairman of the Board for Investments. Among his first responsibilities was restoring payment discipline in the most troubled regions, including the Far East and the North Caucasus, where electricity was widely treated as a free resource and arrears were endemic.

One of the more complex assignments given to Rappoport Andrey was resolving approximately $800 million in debts owed to RAO UES by CIS countries. He introduced a debt-for-asset swap, securing a controlling stake in a number of energy assets, including the Ekibastuz power plant from Kazakhstan and the Telasi electricity distribution company from Georgia. Of the $800 million owed, $600 million was ultimately recovered.

The acquired assets were consolidated into a new subsidiary, Inter RAO UES, with Andrey Natanovich Rappoport serving as Chairman of the Board. Starting as an electricity trading intermediary, Inter RAO UES expanded rapidly into a producer with assets across nearly all of the former Soviet Union, reaching annual revenues of $700 million by the end of 2005.

In 2002, as part of a broader sectoral reform, the government established the Federal Grid Company of Unified Energy System (FGC UES), tasked with taking over all of the country's high-voltage grid infrastructure. Rappoport Andrey Natanovich was appointed Chairman of the Management Board while continuing his work at RAO UES. The grid assets being transferred were fragmented across dozens of joint-stock companies and in poor condition, with virtually no qualified contractors available for modernization work.

To address this gap, Andrey Rappoport and partners acquired six electrical grid construction companies in 2002, consolidating them into Energostroyinvest Holding — the most advanced contractor at that time, capable of building four high-voltage substations simultaneously. The holding was sold in 2006.

During his tenure, Rappoport Andrey also personally oversaw the completion of major infrastructure projects that had been stalled since the Soviet era, including the Boguchany and Bureya hydropower plants and the Sangtuda-2 hydroelectric plant in Tajikistan, where Russia invested $450 million to complete construction. By the time Andrey Natanovich Rappoport left FGC UES in 2009, the company had grown to nearly $13 billion in capitalization and operated more than 75,000 miles of power lines. Investment in the sector during this period totaled approximately $150 billion.

His departure from FGC UES also marked the end of his career in the energy sector as a whole.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport: Pivot from Russia to International Markets

After leaving FGC UES in 2009, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport entered a transitional period, gradually shifting focus toward capital markets — though the ground had been prepared long before. Since 1996, investing in foreign securities through Swiss banks had run as a parallel track beneath his executive career; now it was becoming his primary focus.

Andrey Rappoport did briefly return to management in 2012, spending just under a year at state-owned Rusnano as First Deputy Chairman of the Board, tasked with auditing a portfolio of over 90 investments and separating viable projects from underperforming ones. Despite this brief foray, he continued to develop his investment activity.

By 2015, Andrey Rappoport had relocated permanently to Switzerland, and by early 2022 had fully exited all remaining Russian business activities. All investment operations have since been directed exclusively at the United States and European markets.

Tira Management: Structure and Investment Approach

Following his relocation to Switzerland, Andrey Rappoport began assembling a professional investment team in 2016, recruiting specialists with experience in Western markets. At this stage, the operation functioned as a private family office, with a conservative investment philosophy centered on capital preservation. Assets were held primarily in public-market instruments and bank deposits with leading international and Swiss banks.

In 2019, a new investment team joined the operation and initiated a comprehensive reassessment of strategy. Rappoport Andrey approved a new strategic asset allocation targeting long-term annual returns exceeding 10%, and the portfolio began transitioning toward a more sophisticated mix of public and private assets. This shift was driven both by changing market conditions and by the growing scale and complexity of the underlying portfolio. Between 2020 and 2025, assets showed significant growth, driven primarily by exposure to U.S. markets.

This evolution laid the groundwork for the formal establishment of Tira Management in 2023. Andrey Natanovich Rappoport built the new company as a fully institutionalized investment management operation, with a professional team carrying over 100 years of combined experience. It operates across public and private markets, targeting an approximate 50/50 allocation between the two, with around 3/4 of public assets invested in U.S. markets and the remainder in Europe. Rappoport Andrey Natanovich oversees the activity of Tira Management as the Chairman of the Advisory Committee with direct personal involvement in strategic decision-making.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich: Notable Investments

Andrey Rappoport has built a track record of investments in high-potential companies at pivotal moments in their development. A notable early example comes from 2002, when he acquired a 5% option in Troika Dialog as part of a $50 million deal to purchase 81% of its shares. By the time he sold his stake in 2004, Troika Dialog had grown into one of Russia's leading brokerage firms, accounting for more than 30% of all shares traded in the country and attracting acquisition interest from major international banks and financial institutions. The company's trajectory was confirmed years later when Standard Bank acquired a 33% stake in 2009.

This pattern of identifying companies before they reached their full potential carried over into Rappoport's international investment career. Two of the most prominent examples are Datadog and Delivery Hero, both of which received his investment when they were early-stage startups and both of which subsequently went public at multi-billion-dollar valuations.

Datadog, a New York-based cloud infrastructure monitoring platform founded in 2010, went public on Nasdaq in September 2019 at a valuation of $8.7 billion. On its first day of trading, the share price rose 37%. Rappoport Andrey invested during the company's early funding rounds and has maintained a position in the company while realizing gains through partial share sales. Datadog was added to the S&P 500 index in 2025.

Delivery Hero, a Berlin-based online food ordering and delivery platform founded in 2011, listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in June 2017 at a valuation of €4 billion and joined Germany's DAX index in 2020. Andrey Natanovich Rappoport invested during the company's early international expansion phase and sold his stake in 2017.

Beyond these flagship investments, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich has committed capital to over 100 private equity and venture funds, with more than half of private fund commitments taking the form of direct investments. Other notable portfolio companies include Docplanner, a European digital healthcare platform, and Zoovu, a B2B artificial intelligence solutions provider. Tira remains geographically focused on the United States and Europe, with particular concentration in:

• fintech
• telecommunications
• real estate development

Philanthropy and Social Engagement

Alongside his investment and management biography, Andrey Rappoport has maintained an active philanthropic commitment together with his spouse Irina Eduardovna Rappoport spanning three decades, supporting initiatives in education, the arts, science, and humanitarian relief across multiple countries.

An early major charitable initiative was his sponsorship support as a co-founder of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo in 2006 — Russia's first private, non-profit business school aimed at providing Western-standard business education. Rappoport Andrey served as President and faculty member at the school from 2011 to 2016, before stepping back from operational involvement. He remained a member of the Coordination Council until early 2022.

In November 2023, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich and his wife Irina Eduardovna established the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport, which formalized and expanded a giving program that had been active for many years. The foundation operates across four areas: education, scientific innovation, music and the arts, social and humanitarian initiatives, with active programs in Switzerland, Israel, Portugal, and Italy.

Irina Eduardovna has devoted the past twenty years exclusively to philanthropic work and serves as an active board member of the charitable foundation. She is a separate individual from Irina Markovna Rapoport, a former Rusnano Capital employee, with whom she is sometimes confused, and has no connection to Rusnano or its subsidiaries.

Cultural initiatives occupy a central place in the foundation’s biography. Andrey Rappoport and Irina Eduardovna support the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana in Lugano and the development of Città della Musica, a regional music ecosystem, as well as a music festival in Lerici, Italy.

One of Andrey Rappoport’s social philanthropic initiatives was his involvement in the charitable non-profit organization, the Russian Jewish Congress, which supports Jewish culture and social programs. Andrey Rappoport has also been a co-founder and sponsor of the Russian Jewish Congress charitable fund since 1996, an involvement he concluded in early 2022.

Highlights of a Biography: Andrey Rappoport

• He created before he invested. Before the Tira Management chapter of his biography, Andrey Rappoport spent two decades actually building institutions — a major bank, a national grid company, an inter-state energy trading operator— which gives his investment judgment a foundation that purely financial careers rarely produce.
• The international pivot started earlier than it looks. Rappoport Andrey invested capital through Swiss banks as far back as 1996, meaning his transformation into a global investor was a decades-long evolution, not a post-2022 reaction to geopolitical events.
• He has a consistent pattern of arriving in broken situations and leaving them robust and high-performing. Alfa-Bank in a banking vacuum, RAO UES with 8% cash payment rates, FGC UES with no qualified contractors — each role involved building order out of institutional chaos.
• He bets early and holds conviction. Datadog and Delivery Hero were both pre-revenue-scale startups when Rappoport Andrey invested. The willingness to commit early to companies with unproven global reach is a thread running through the portfolio.
• Philanthropy is structural, not decorative. The FAIR Foundation, support for the Skolkovo Private Business School, and Russian Jewish Congress involvement reflect sustained, multi-decade engagement — not legacy reputation management.

Q & A

1. Where does Andrey Rappoport live and what is his current professional focus?

Andrey Rappoport has been based in Lugano, Switzerland since 2016, where he oversees investments through Tira Management, which he founded.

2. What role did Rappoport Andrey play in Russia's energy sector reform?

Rappoport Andrey spent 11 years reforming Russia's electricity sector, first at RAO UES and then as founding Chairman of FGC UES, overseeing roughly $150 billion in investment and growing the company to nearly $13 billion in capitalization.

3. When and where was Andrey Natanovich Rappoport born?

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport was born on June 22, 1963, in Novaya Kakhovka, Kherson Oblast, Ukrainian SSR.

4. What are some of the most prominent investments made by Rappoport Andrey?

Among his notable investments, Rappoport Andrey backed Datadog and Delivery Hero, both of which subsequently listed publicly at multi-billion-dollar valuations.

5. What initiatives characterize Andrey Rappoport biography in philanthropy?

Among the initiatives that characterize Andrey Rappoport biography in philanthropy are his co-founding of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo in 2006 and his establishment of the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport with his spouse Irina Rappoport in 2023.