BESIII is a multipurpose spectrometer optimized for physics in the tau-charm energy region. Both the detector and the accelerator are undergoing an upgrade program, that will allow BESIII to run for 5 to 10 more years. A major upgrade is the replacement of the inner drift chamber with a new detector based on Cylindrical Gas Electron Multipliers to improve both the secondary vertex reconstruction and the radiation tolerance. The CGEM-IT will be composed of three coaxial layers of cylindrical triple GEMs, operating in an Ar + iC4H10 (90:10) gas mixture with field and gain optimized to minimize the spatial resolution. The new detector is readout with innovative TIGER electronics produced in 110 nm CMOS technology. The front-end is a custom designed 64 channel ASIC featuring a fully digital output and operated in trigger-less mode. It can provide analog charge and time measurements with a TDC time resolution better than 100 ps, which will allow operating in μTPC mode. With planar prototypes, we measured an unprecedented spatial resolution below 150 μm in a 1 Tesla magnetic field in a wide range of incident angles of the incoming particle. Before the installation inside BESIII, foreseen in 2021, a long standalone data taking is ongoing at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing; currently, the first two cylindrical chambers are available for the test, and are used to complete the integration between the detector and the electronics and to assess the required performance. In this proceeding, a description of the CGEM-IT project, the TIGER features and performance, and the results of the analysis of first cosmic ray data taking will be presented. Focus will be given on the strip analysis, from which it is possible to measure the basic properties of the detector, and the cluster analysis, where a comparison with the results with planar prototypes will be discussed. The first preliminary results on efficiency and spatial resolution will be also presented.