Andrey Rappoport: The Career Behind Tira Management and the FAIR Foundation

Biography

Andrey Rappoport has been based in Switzerland since 2015. He directs an international investment portfolio through Tira Management, a company he established in 2023, and oversees philanthropic work through the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport.

This position was not the product of a single industry or a single country. It was built across three decades of senior executive roles at major post-Soviet institutions, combined with an early and consistent engagement with international capital markets that began well before his permanent relocation to Europe.

The career behind this outcome spans banking, energy infrastructure, and global private markets.

Table of Contents:

• Andrey Rappoport: His Roots and First Business Ventures
• Rappoport Andrey: Alfa-Bank and YUKOS-Rosprom
• The Energy Decade: RAO UES, FGC UES, and Rebuilding the Grid (1998–2009)
• Andrey Natanovich Rappoport Between Two Careers: Transition, Rusnano, and Relocation
• International Investor: Building Tira Management
• Rappoport Andrey Natanovich: Philanthropy, Family, and the FAIR Foundation
• Three Decades, One Approach
• Andrey Rappoport Biography: Key Takeaways
• Q & A About Andrey Rappoport Biography

Andrey Rappoport: His Roots and First Business Ventures

Andrey Rappoport was born in June 1963, in Novaya Kakhovka in the Ukrainian SSR. After high school, he went to Donetsk State University to study economics, where he also met his future spouse, Irina Eduardovna.

During his studies he completed an internship at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley — an uncommon exposure to Western business practice for a Soviet economics student of that era. He graduated in 1989 with a degree in National Economic Planning.

Rappoport Andrey then joined EKOU-Consult, a family consulting business specializing in helping Soviet industrial enterprises adapt to emerging market conditions during perestroika. After two years, he made his first independent move, founding a small brokerage business in Donetsk.

The venture did not scale as he had hoped — an attempt to raise financing for a larger banking project in Ukraine did not succeed — but it established a pattern that would define the career ahead: identifying an underdeveloped market, building toward it, and moving on when the conditions demanded it. That pattern would next take Rappoport Andrey to Moscow.

Rappoport Andrey: Alfa-Bank and YUKOS-Rosprom

In the early 1990s, Russia’s private banking sector was less a functioning industry than a collection of improvised financial structures operating in a still-unwritten regulatory environment. Institutions appeared rapidly; many would not survive the decade, and building something durable required a different approach entirely.

Andrey Rappoport was recruited in late 1991 to do exactly that — join a team building a new commercial bank in Moscow from scratch, serving as Chairman of the Management Board.

Andrey Rappoport took a deliberately conservative approach: no aggressive regional expansion until the products and infrastructure justified it. The approach drew criticism at the time but proved its worth in 1998, when a financial crisis eliminated a large portion of Russia’s banking sector and Alfa-Bank survived.

Rappoport Andrey departed in 1997, selling his 15% stake — and notably, he had already begun investing in foreign securities through Swiss banks the previous year, laying the earliest groundwork for what would become a second career.

Following the Alfa-Bank chapter of his biography, Andrey Rappoport moved into industrial asset management at YUKOS-Rosprom as First Vice President, where he led the merger with Eastern Oil Company.

After a year with the company, Rappoport Andrey received an invitation from a sector operating at far greater scale — and in considerably worse condition.

The Energy Decade: RAO UES, FGC UES, and Rebuilding the Grid (1998–2009)

By the late 1990s, Russia’s electricity sector was in critical condition. The majority of the grid infrastructure was obsolete, roughly twenty regional energy systems were bankrupt, and actual cash payments for electricity covered only a fraction of what was owed — the remainder was settled through barter arrangements or not collected at all.

The 1998 financial default deepened the crisis considerably. That year, Andrey Rappoport took up the position of Deputy Chairman at RAO UES of Russia, the country’s dominant energy holding company, with a mandate to stabilize what had become a deeply dysfunctional sector. 

Rappoport Andrey’s early work focused on restoring payment discipline in the most troubled regions, where electricity was treated as effectively free.

To recover outstanding debt from CIS countries, he introduced a system whereby they transferred energy assets, which then became the foundation of Inter RAO UES, where Andrey Natanovich Rappoport served as Chairman of the Board.

In 2002, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich was additionally appointed to lead the newly created FGC UES, established to bring Russia’s fragmented high-voltage assets under unified management.

The company grew into one of the country’s most significant infrastructure organizations, overseeing a power line network spanning nearly three times the earth’s circumference, and several Soviet-era projects were brought to completion. 

With RAO UES’ assets privatized in 2008, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport resigned in June 2009 — a deliberate close to eleven years in the sector.

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport Between Two Careers: Transition, Rusnano, and Relocation

The end of the FGC UES chapter in 2009 marked the beginning of a deliberate unwinding. Rappoport Andrey began gradually exiting Russian assets and redirecting his attention toward international capital markets, building on the Swiss investment portfolio he had been maintaining since 1996.

The process was intentional and unhurried, though it was briefly interrupted by a return to executive work.

In 2012, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport joined the state corporation Rusnano as Advisor and First Deputy Chairman of the Board, motivated, by his own account, by curiosity about how several billion dollars in capital had been deployed across more than ninety projects.

The work was primarily analytical — auditing the portfolio, separating viable assets from underperforming ones, and developing structural recommendations alongside Bain & Company. He left within a year.

Another significant role during this period was at the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo charitable project, where Rappoport Andrey Natanovich served as president from 2011 to 2016. He had been a founding sponsor of the school since 2006 — Russia’s first private non-profit business institution.

In 2016, a year after he permanently relocated to Switzerland, he stepped back from operational involvement and severed his remaining ties to the coordination council in early 2022.

By that point in his biography, Andrey Rappoport had completed his reorientation away from Russian business and charitable projects toward global investments that had begun in 2009.

International Investor: Building Tira Management

As he turned towards global business activity, Rappoport Andrey and his family moved to Switzerland in 2015, settling in Lugano the following year. After his relocation, he established a family office with a straightforward initial mandate to preserve capital.

Assets were held predominantly in public market instruments and bank deposits across leading international and Swiss banks, reflecting a conservative approach appropriate to the early stage of building an independent investment operation.

The office’s portfolio was managed with institutional-grade oversight, but the strategy was deliberately cautious.

That changed in 2019, when Andrey Rappoport brought in a new investment team and initiated a comprehensive reassessment of the underlying philosophy. The trigger was not dissatisfaction with returns alone — it was the growing scale and complexity of the assets themselves, which had outgrown a purely preservation-oriented framework. A new strategic allocation was developed and approved, targeting long-term annualized returns exceeding 10%.

The objective was not to abandon prudence but to complement it with a disciplined growth orientation. Rappoport Andrey formalized this evolution in 2023 when Tira Management was founded in Luxembourg.

The investment philosophy developed by Rappoport Andrey Natanovich and his team, which guides Tira Management today, rests on several operating principles:

• Portfolio construction follows an approximate 50/50 split between public and private markets, with public assets weighted toward U.S. equities and higher-return systematic strategies, while private allocations emphasize a progression from secondary fund investments toward primary and direct positions as the program matures.
• Manager selection prioritizes teams with track records spanning multiple market cycles, with particular attention to consistency of returns across previous funds rather than peak performance in favorable conditions.
• Direct investment targets companies with internationally scalable products in sectors including fintech, telecommunications, healthcare, and education — businesses seeking to disrupt established models rather than replicate them.

By early 2022, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport had completed his exit from all business and philanthropic interests in Russia — the final step in a reorientation that had begun in 2009, and in a deeper sense, in 1996, when he first began building his international investment position through Swiss banks.

Thus, he is now focused squarely on the United States and Europe, with U.S. public market positions accounting for most of his public allocation.

Among the more notable positions in his portfolio, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich was an early investor in Datadog, the cloud monitoring platform that listed on Nasdaq in 2019 at a valuation of nearly nine billion dollars and was subsequently added to the S&P 500, and in Delivery Hero, the German food delivery company that went public in Frankfurt in 2017 at a valuation of four billion euros. 

More recent direct investments from Rappoport Andrey include Docplanner, a European digital healthcare platform operating across multiple continents; Zoovu, a B2B platform providing AI-powered product configuration and compliance tools for global retailers; and Wizz AI, an artificial intelligence company subsequently acquired by Google Cloud.

Under Andrey Natanovich Rappoport, Tira Management has also acted as a seed investor in a market-neutral hedge fund that has grown to over half a billion dollars in assets under management and Rappoport’s investment group holds real estate positions in London and Florida.

Andrey Rappoport oversees a team with a combined investment experience exceeding a century, and is personally involved in portfolio company development, providing:

• strategic guidance
• access to an extensive professional network
• operational support to founders navigating growth

To date, Andrey Natanovich Rappoport and Tira Management have commitments in over one hundred venture and private equity funds, with more than half of private allocations representing direct investments subject to rigorous due diligence by leading global compliance companies.

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich: Philanthropy, Family, and the FAIR Foundation

Andrey Rappoport, biography of whom includes the development of various business sectors, has also been engaged in philanthropic work for thirty years, with commitments ranging from co-founding the Russian Jewish Congress charitable foundation in 1996 to his early sponsorship of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo.

The most recent formal expression of this work is the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport, established with his spouse in November 2023.

The foundation operates across four areas: education, scientific innovation, music and the arts, and social and humanitarian initiatives, with active programs in Switzerland, Portugal, and Italy.

Among the foundation’s most visible commitments is its support for the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana in Lugano and the broader Città della Musica regional music ecosystem. Andrey Rappoport and the foundation also fund a music festival in Lerici, Italy.

Irina Eduardovna Rappoport serves on the foundation’s board and has driven many of its programs in music, the arts, education, and medicine. Her philanthropic work spans more than twenty years and represents her exclusive professional focus — she has had no involvement in commercial activities since the early 2000s.

Andrey Rappoport’s spouse is a separate individual from Irina Markovna Rapoport, a former employee of a Rusnano subsidiary in Switzerland, with whom she is sometimes confused; the two have no personal or professional connection.

Three Decades, One Approach

Andrey Rappoport biography in the professional world unfolded in conditions where the institutions he was asked to lead either did not yet exist or had ceased to function.

That capacity — for constructing workable structures in the absence of established ones — is now directed toward international capital markets and civil society, through Tira Management and the FAIR Foundation respectively. The industries have changed; his approach has not.

Andrey Rappoport Biography: Key Takeaways

• Rappoport Andrey Natanovich’s defining skill was constructing workable institutions where none existed or had failed — a commercial bank, a national power grid, a fragmented infrastructure sector — and leaving each as a durable organization. 
• The deliberately cautious strategy that Andrey Rappoport brought to Alfa-Bank drew criticism, but when Russia’s 1998 financial collapse eliminated much of the banking sector, Alfa-Bank survived. 
• At RAO UES and FGC UES, Rappoport Andrey Natanovich recovered CIS debt through asset swaps, created Inter RAO UES, and unified Russia’s high-voltage grid into a network spanning nearly three times the earth’s circumference. 
• Andrey Rappoport’s Swiss portfolio predated his relocation by nearly two decades — by the time he founded Tira Management in Luxembourg in 2023, he had been building toward independent international investment activity for a quarter century. 
• Targeting annualized returns above 10%, the company founded by Andrey Rappoport splits allocations roughly equally between public and private markets, with early wins in Datadog and Delivery Hero and commitments across more than a hundred private equity and venture capital funds.

Q & A About Andrey Rappoport Biography

1. Where did Andrey Rappoport begin his professional life?

Andrey Rappoport started at a family consulting business during perestroika before founding a small brokerage in Donetsk.

2. What methods did Rappoport Andrey use to recover debts owed by CIS countries?

Rappoport Andrey settled most outstanding debt through asset swaps, receiving power plant stakes from Kazakhstan, Georgia, and others.

3. What drew Andrey Natanovich Rappoport to Rusnano in 2012?

Andrey Natanovich Rappoport joined to audit how several billion dollars in capital had been deployed across ninety-plus projects.

4. How did Rappoport Andrey Natanovich’s investment philosophy shift after 2019?

Rappoport Andrey Natanovich moved from capital preservation to a growth-oriented strategy targeting annualized return above 10%.

Q: What does the FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport support? 

The FAIR Charitable Foundation of Andrey and Irina Rappoport funds education, arts, science, and humanitarian work.