Jared Kushner's new fund raises old questions

When Jared Kushner formed Affinity Partners in 2021, and then raised most of his first fund from Middle Eastern sovereigns, he took great pains to say that the endeavor was conceived after he left the White House.

  • He bristled at suggestions of quid pro quo, but also understood that the whiff was strong enough that it had to be addressed.

  • Kushner also insisted that his government days were in the past, even if his father-in-law regained power. Full-time private equity guy in Miami, not a D.C. denizen hoping to boomerang.

But it hasn't quite worked out that way, ressurecting old questions as Affinity begins premarketing its second fund. READ MORE

Steve Young Says Bay Area Ties Helped Build Private Equity Empire

Legendary NFL quarterback Steve Young, whose investment firm recently closed a $3.2 billion fund, says there’s something to the idea that playing for the 49ers—near Silicon Valley—helps former football players break into private equity and venture capital.

“If I played for the Vikings, I don’t think this goes the same way,” Young tells Front Office Sports. READ MORE

Why AI Makes Venture Capital More Vulnerable, Not Smarter

Venture capital is in the middle of a quiet power shift.

Over the past few years, some of the largest and most consequential deals in tech, healthcare and life sciences have not been led by traditional venture firms at all. Instead, family offices and sovereign wealth funds are backing bigger bets, longer timelines and platforms that stretch across borders, often outside the constraints of the traditional 10-year fund model.  READ MORE

How Investing In Startups Keeps Corporations At The Cutting Edge Of Technology

Corporations are always looking for cutting-edge technology to keep them more competitive. It’s a challenge because many corporations use traditional technology, yet they need to break out of it to accelerate business growth.

While becoming innovative is possible internally, corporations often struggle with it. They know innovation is critical to getting ahead of the competition, but they also know it is hard to develop innovation in a corporate environment. Let’s learn more about how investing in startups can help corporations find cutting-edge technology and how they can find innovative companies to invest in. READ MORE

Was it SPAC week? SEC charges SPAC with misleading statements

Perfectly calibrated to slap an exclamation point on last Wednesday’s 581-page SPAC release (see this PubCo post), this new SEC Order, posted the following day, reflects settled charges against Northern Star Investment Corp. II, a SPAC, for misleading statements in its SEC filings in connection with its SPAC IPO and failed de-SPAC transaction. In the SPAC release, the SEC noted concerns from commentators regarding the adequacy of the disclosures provided to investors in SPAC IPOs and de-SPAC transactions.  In this case, the SEC charged that Northern Star stated in its SEC filings that, prior to filing its S-1 for its IPO, it had had no substantive discussions with any potential target; in reality, however, Northern Star had had several discussions with the ultimate target regarding a potential SPAC business combination. According to the Director of the SEC’s Philadelphia Regional Office, “Northern Star’s failure to disclose discussions with its merger target kept investors in the dark about its future plans, information that would have been important in deciding whether to invest in this SPAC….Given that the purpose of a SPAC is to identify and acquire an operating business, SPACs should be transparent about any pre-IPO discussions with potential acquisition targets.”  Northern Star was ordered to pay a civil money penalty of $1.5 million for violation of the antifraud provisions of the Securities Act. READ MORE

SEC's blank-check rules coincide with market slump

The SEC approved a new set of rules for special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) this week, long after the damage was done by the recent mania.

Why it matters: It remains to be seen what effect they'll have on the future of blank-check companies.

The big picture: Following the SPAC mania of 2020–2021, the SEC proposed rules nearly two years ago to curb what it saw as loopholes in regulations for blank-check companies. READ MORE

Shadow Governance And Antitrust In The Age Of Big Tech

As Big Tech investments proliferate across emerging startups—advancing everything from AI to crypto to biotech—markets brim with promise of human progress through innovation. But when titans extend tentacles into rising potential competitors, what whispers echo from conference rooms with two-way mirrors? Emerging trends around influence through minority board positions should spur regulators to reassess antitrust frameworks developed long before today's complex web of strategic investments between dominant platforms and startups. READ MORE

Venture Capital Is Going To Heat Back Up

Everyone knows how Amazon AMZN -1% started as a simple book store or how Meta began in a dorm room. At some point all of today’s great companies were just a passion project, a great idea in need of capital, employees, and the first real customer. While some ideas grow to become companies organically without outside investors, most companies need help. They need capital, they need expertise, they need connections and support. READ MORE

Corporate investors remain key pillars of life sciences and healthcare

Entering 2023, the private venture-backed life sciences and healthcare landscape undoubtedly looks and feels different than it did during the fast-paced, valuation-rich days of 2021. Silicon Valley Bank’s most recent Healthcare Investment and Exits report revealed that 2022 was still the second-largest year on record for venture capital investment into healthcare companies in the US, UK and EU. However, investment dollars dropped 34% from 2021’s peak, and public markets were eerily quiet, with only 31 private venture-backed healthcare IPOs versus 174. READ MORE

It’s Crazy How Much Investors Cut Back From Q1 to Q4

As we bid adieu to 2022, it seems easy in hindsight to sum up the startup investment climate as your usual cyclic clean-up after a big party. Valuations fell, investors got pickier, and a cratering public market reminded us that tech stocks do sometimes go down.

But parsing through the quarter-by-quarter numbers for active investors, it’s clear 2022 wasn’t entirely a clean-up-the-mess year. For large investors, the party actually continued to rage through the first quarter and remained festive in the second. Only in the latter half of the year did we really see a big slowdown. READ MORE

How companies can successfully navigate the VC investment process

Securing investment from VCs can be disruptive and slow – but there are things that can be done to ease the process

Most successful founders will tell you that getting venture capital (VC) to invest in your business is often the start of a long and disruptive process. Having a fundraising plan and getting your house in order helps minimize disruption to your business, avoids wasting time and makes the process as straightforward as possible. READ MORE

Litigation Finance Drives Profits For Private Equity And Venture Capital Firms And Their Lawyers

Lawyers representing private equity and venture capital portfolio firms understand that their clients routinely face important business decisions about whether to initiate meritorious litigation claims that could result in substantial recoveries.

Yet convincing their clients to move forward with litigation—no matter how lucrative it may ultimately be—is another matter entirely. The main culprit for this hesitancy is a simple one: PE and VC firms are loath to saddle their portfolio companies with the expense of litigation when that precious capital could be used to enhance a company’s operations or develop new products. READ MORE

The legal threat coming for venture capital

After being battered by rising interest rates and choppy markets, the venture capital industry is sweating new regulations that could expose fund managers to legal risks.

The SEC is putting the final touches on a rule that would make it easier for investors to sue VCs for bad behavior, negligence or recklessness. It would “open up all types of litigation risk to being a venture capitalist,” Justin Field, the National Venture Capital Association’s senior vice president of government affairs, told MM. READ MORE

Most Active Startup Investors Hit The Brakes In 2022

For multiple years, the most active startup investors kept upping their games. They did more deals, backed larger rounds, and kept pushing up valuations. 

In 2022, they took a breather. Per Crunchbase, virtually all of the most prolific venture and seed investors did fewer deals last year than the year before. The value of rounds they led shrunk too, with particularly steep declines for SoftBank Vision Fund and Tiger Global Management, which pulled back in the wake of heavy losses in their existing portfolios. READ MORE

Where Is Venture Capital Headed In 2022?

My colleagues and I at Prime Movers Lab reviewed over 3,000 investment opportunities last year and are on pace to exceed that in 2022. In the process, we deployed more than $400 million across six sectors: transportation, energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, agriculture and human augmentation. To accurately allocate capital across so many burgeoning sectors, every year, we run 25-plus squads, which are our internal teams that go deep on particular technologies and themes, such as lithium, orbital debris and cultivated seafood. The work of these squads, combined with the careful watching of public and private markets, have led me to a few predictions for where I see venture capital going the rest of this year. READ MORE