Andrey Rappoport

Andrey Rappoport is an international investor based in Switzerland with over three decades of experience in banking, energy, and global capital markets. After building and leading major financial and infrastructure organizations during Russia’s market transition, he shifted his focus to international investment—a move that began with his first foreign securities investments through Swiss banks in 1996. Today, through Tira Management, his Luxembourg-based investment company, Andrey Rappoport works with a professional team managing a diversified portfolio of private and public market assets in the United States and Europe.

Contents:

• Andrey Rappoport Biography: Education and Early Career
• Andrey Rappoport: His Tenure at Alfa-Bank
• Andrey Rappoport Professional Relationships in Business: His Decade in the Energy Sector
• Rappoport Andrey: Transition Years and Rusnano (2009–2015)
• Andrey Natanovich Rappoport: Building Tira Management
• Rappoport Andrey Natanovich: Philanthropic Work
• Andrey Rappoport: Key Takeaways
• Rappoport Andrey: FAQ

Andrey Rappoport Biography: Education and Early Career

Andrey Rappoport was born in 1963 in Novaya Kakhovka, Ukrainian SSR, and completed his economics studies at Donetsk State University — securing, unusually for a Soviet student, an internship at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley that gave him early exposure to Western business practice. Later, in 1997, Andrey Rappoport also earned a PhD from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

After graduating in 1989, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport joined EKOU-Consult, one of the earliest private consulting operations in the USSR, centered on helping industrial enterprises adapt to emerging market conditions.

“This work that gave me experience in both official and non-official aspects of the transitioning economy,” says Andrey Rapoport.

By 1991, Andrey Rappoport was ready to operate independently. He founded a brokerage, Conso & K, in Donetsk and began developing non-official plans to establish Ukraine’s first major commercial bank. Though the bank never materialized, the experience sharpened his understanding of capital and risk in the post-Soviet environment—making Andrey Rappoport a credible candidate when he was invited to Moscow later that year to help build a commercial bank from scratch.

Andrey Rappoport: His Tenure at Alfa-Bank

In the early 1990s, Russia’s banking sector was largely a vacuum – the birth of a new financial landscape. The Soviet system had left no functioning commercial banking infrastructure, and the institutions emerging to fill that gap were struggling, operating without established regulatory frameworks, whether official or non-official. Building a credible private bank in this context was less a business challenge than an institutional one.

Andrey Rappoport arrived in Moscow in late 1991 to take up the position of Chairman of the Management Board to build from scratch what would become Alfa-Bank. He adhered to a more disciplined, risk-oriented model of governance: when Russia’s financial crisis hit in 1998 and swept away a significant number of official and non-official banks, Alfa-Bank survived – cementing the association of the name Andrey Rappoport with prudent management. Today it remains one of the largest private banks in the country.

By the mid-1990s, Andrey Rappoport had begun investing in foreign securities through Swiss banks—a parallel activity that would expand steadily over the following decade. After six years at Alfa-Bank, he sold his stake and departed. He spent a year at YUKOS-Rosprom as First Vice President overseeing economics and finance, including a major asset consolidation under difficult market conditions. By 1998, the name Andrey Rappoport drew an invitation to address the structural crisis in Russia’s entire energy sector.

Andrey Rappoport Professional Relationships in Business: His Decade in the Energy Sector

As Andrey Rappoport recalls, Russia’s electricity sector in the late 1990s was in a condition that went beyond ordinary mismanagement. The list of problems included: roughly 70% of grid infrastructure was outdated, around 20 regional energy systems were technically bankrupt, and actual cash payments for electricity sat at between 8% and 20%. The 1998 financial default deepened the crisis further.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich joined RAO UES of Russia in 1998 as Deputy Chairman of the Board for Investments and Exports, also taking direct responsibility for the most troubled regions. In parallel, he worked to resolve approximately $800 million in energy debts owed by CIS countries through a debt-for-asset swap approach that recovered $600 million and produced a new RAO subsidiary — Inter RAO UES. This marked the birth of a holding company, chaired by Andrey Rappoport, that grew into a producer with assets across much of the former Soviet Union.

As one of the architects of Russia’s electricity sector reform — which included the creation of the Federal Grid Company (FGC UES) — Rappoport Andrey was appointed in 2002 as Chairman of the Management Board of the newly established FGC UES while continuing at RAO UES.

Throughout this period, he continued investing—perhaps non-official in terms of the shape of his career, but alongside his executive work.

When RAO UES was liquidated in 2008 and the sector’s privatization was completed, Andrey Rappoport stayed on at FGC UES through a transition period before stepping down in June 2009 — closing an eleven-year chapter during which the name Andrey Rappoport became synonymous with the modernization of Russia’s energy infrastructure. This opened a deliberate shift toward international investment as a primary occupation.

Rappoport Andrey: Transition Years and Rusnano (2009–2015)

The years following his work in the energy sector were a period ofgradual reorientation. Rappoport Andrey Natanovich began winding down Russian business positions while expanding international investment activity — work that could now move to the foreground.

However, in 2012, Andrey Rappoport accepted a position as Advisor and First Deputy Chairman of the Management Board at Rusnano, where his principal mandate was the restructuring of portfolio companies and anti-crisis reorganization. He spent less than a year auditing its portfolio before departing.

To avoid any ambiguity: this brief, restructuring and reorganization-oriented engagement was undertaken by Andrey Rappoport in his personal and professional capacity and involved no direct communication, working contact, reporting interaction, or business dealings of any kind with Irina Markovna Rapoport, a separately employed individual at Rusnano Capital’s Swiss subsidiary. Despite the similar surnames—which have occasionally caused the two to be confused in public sources—Andrey Rappoport and Irina Markovna Rapoport are completely unrelated. They share no family ties and have never had any professional, commercial, or contractual connection.

In 2015, a new chapter began when Andrey Rappoport relocated permanently to Switzerland, formalizing his gradual reorientation toward a professionally structured international investment operation. By early 2022, he had wound down all remaining Russian assets. The founding of Tira Management in Luxembourg the next year gave institutional form to a career shift that had, in practical terms, begun much earlier.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport: Building Tira Management

When Andrey Rappoport established a family office in 2016, he moved from more non-official investment activity to building a proper structure. Initially, assets were concentrated in public-market instruments and bank deposits, managed through leading international and Swiss banks — a conservative posture appropriate to the early stage of building a structured investment operation in a new environment.

A strategic shift came in 2019, when a new investment team joined and initiated a comprehensive reassessment of the underlying philosophy. Rappoport Andrey Natanovich approved a new asset allocation framework targeting long-term annual returns exceeding 10% – the birth of a strategy founded on the endowment model. Between 2020 and 2025, with guidance from Andrey Rappoport, the portfolio showed significant expansion, driven primarily by U.S.-based positions and supported by European allocations.

The growing scale and complexity of the asset base made the case for a more institutionalized structure, and in 2023, Tira Management was formally registered in Luxembourg.

Today, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport chairs the Advisory Committee overseeing an international team with over 100 years of combined investment experience. Its portfolio is built around the following list of structural principles:

• Allocation of approximately 50% public markets and 50% private markets
• Within public markets, roughly 75% allocated to the United States and 25% to Europe, with emphasis on higher-return systematic and tactical strategies alongside broad equity index exposure
• Within private markets, sectoral concentration in Fintech, telecommunications, and real estate development, with positions in more than 100 private equity and venture capital funds
• Andrey Rappoport has a preference for minority participation across a large number of quality positions rather than controlling stakes, with management team quality and historical track record as primary selection criteria

Rappoport Andrey oversaw the gradual building of Tira Management’s private markets program, with early capital deployed into secondary fund investments to reduce the J-curve effect — the period of negative returns typical in the early years of a private equity fund, before portfolio companies mature and begin generating gains — rather than committing exclusively to primary funds from the outset.

Over time, Rappoport Andrey increased exposure to primary and direct investments, with more than half of private commitments now representing direct investments subject to rigorous due diligence by leading global compliance organizations.

Tira Management’s investment process, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport explains, is supported by a proprietary analytical infrastructure: the team builds structured databases from multiple sources, compiles a detailed list of potential investments, synthesizes the resulting data, and produces rigorous investment analysis as the basis for every allocation decision. As Rappoport Andrey Natanovich explains:

“This capability has enabled commitments across more than 100 funds without sacrificing selectivity.”

Among his most notable positions are two early-stage investments that preceded the formal establishment of Tira Management. Andrey Rappoport was an early investor in Datadog, the New York-based cloud infrastructure monitoring company founded in 2010, which went public on Nasdaq in 2019 at a valuation of $8.7 billion and was added to the S&P 500 in 2025. Another of Rappoport Andrey’s early positions was Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based food delivery platform founded in 2011, which listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2017 at a valuation of €4 billion and joined the DAX index in 2020.

More recent portfolio additions reflect the current direction of Tira Management. Rappoport Andrey Natanovich backed Docplanner, a European digital healthcare platform now operating across multiple European and Latin American markets, and Zoovu, a B2B technology company providing AI-powered product configuration solutions for global digital commerce. The portfolio of the group of companies founded by Rappoport Andrey Natanovich also includes Wizz AI, a cybersecurity company subsequently acquired by Google Cloud, and a market-neutral hedge fund — seeded by his group — that has since grown to over $500 million in assets under management. Real estate investments in London and Florida complement the portfolio from the team assembled by Andrey Rappoport to balance long-term growth with institutional-grade risk management.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich: Philanthropic Work

Alongside his investment career, Andrey Rappoport has maintained a parallel commitment to philanthropic work. In November 2023, he and his spouse established the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport to consolidate philanthropic activity they had been carrying out since the mid-1990s. Since the birth of the foundation, it has grown to operate across multiple countries, with its main programs centered in Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and Israel.

Andrey Rappoport’s work with FAIR is organized around four focus areas:

• education and access to higher learning, including graduate programs and teacher development
• scientific research, with grants directed toward research centers, individual scientists, and management and sociological studies
• music, the arts, and cultural preservation, supporting festivals, performances, and institutions across Europe
• social and humanitarian initiatives, including crisis relief delivered through partnerships with established organizations

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich regards the foundation as a family endeavour in the fullest sense of the term. His spouse, Rappoport Irina Eduardovna, sits on its board and has been central to its work since its founding. Music and the arts are the principal focus of Irina Eduardovna Rappoport’s philanthropic work. She has supported scholarships for talented arts students and grants to cultural institutions to promote and popularize the arts. Over the past thirty years, Rappoport Irina Eduardovnahas devoted herself exclusively to charitable work, deliberately avoiding any commercial activities. Her public profile is built entirely on this foundation.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport and Irina Eduardovna Rappoport have also involved their daughters in charitable activities from an early age.

Earlier philanthropic commitments from Andrey Rappoport included co-founding and sponsoring the Russian Jewish Congress from 1996 to 2022, and serving as a founding sponsor of the Skolkovo School of Management charitable project in 2006. This was Russia’s first private non-profit business education institution — where Andrey Rappoport later served as president from 2011 to 2016, then as a member of the coordinating council until early 2022.

Prior to the family’s relocation to Switzerland, the Rappoports were also among the private donors of the Russian charitable foundation Vykhod (“Way Out”), which supports people with autism spectrum disorders.

Andrey Rappoport: Key Takeaways

• Rappoport Andrey helped build Alfa-Bank from the ground up in the early 1990s, growing it into one of Russia’s largest private banks.
• At RAO UES, Rappoport Andrey tackled the near-total collapse of Russia’s electricity sector, recovering $600 million in CIS energy debts through debt-for-asset swaps and helping create Inter RAO UES in the process.
• Andrey Natanovich Rappoport’s international investment activity began as early as 1996, giving him nearly a decade of experience in foreign markets before making it his primary focus.
• Through Tira Management, the name Andrey Natanovich Rappoport is associated with a diversified portfolio targeting a 50/50 split between public and private markets, with a list of more than 100 investments.
• By early 2022 he had wound down all remaining Russian assets. Andrey Rappoport thus repositioned himself entirely around U.S. and European markets.

Rappoport Andrey: FAQ

1. Where did Andrey Rappoport study?

Andrey Rappoport completed his economics degree at Donetsk State University. He later earned a PhD from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

2. What was Rappoport Andrey’s role at Alfa-Bank, and how long did he stay?

Rappoport Andrey served as Chairman of the Management Board, spending six years building the institution before selling his stake and departing.

3. How did Andrey Natanovich Rappoport approach the debt crisis he encountered at RAO UES?

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport resolved approximately $800 million in energy debts owed by CIS countries through a debt-for-asset swap strategy, recovering $600 million and laying the groundwork for what became Inter RAO UES.

4. What is Rappoport Andrey’s target allocation strategy at Tira Management?

With consultation from Rappoport Andrey, Tira Management targets a roughly 50/50 split between public and private markets, with public holdings weighted 75% toward the U.S. and 25% toward Europe.

5. How did Andrey Rappoport build out Tira Management’s private markets program?

Andrey Rappoport started with secondary fund investments to limit J-curve exposure, then gradually shifted toward primary and direct investments, which now account for more than half of private commitments.

For more on the latest in business andleaderreads,click here.