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Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO was off to a gangbusters start.
Even at an unprecedented valuation of almost $2 trillion, shares shot into space like precious cargo atop a Falcon 9 rocket, soaring from an opening price of $151 to an all-time high days later of over $225 early Tuesday. READ MORE
While some PE firms want to push ahead and buy companies they believe will thrive in the AI era, their calls for term sheets are being turned down—a sudden retreat by longtime partners that has left sponsors frustrated.
"For some of these deals, lenders just say, 'Don't even think about it. We have too much software exposure. We are not going to fund another software buyout,'" said one M&A lawyer, who added they are working on two deals where parties have completed due diligence but no committed lender has been found. READ MORE
Private equity firms have raced to embed AI into portfolio companies, betting it will reshape businesses and boost valuations, yet few have results to show for it.
A round of conversations with advisers provided a reality check on the hype, laying bare the distance between what the PE industry is hankering for from AI and what its experiments have delivered so far. While most firms have been tinkering enthusiastically, many haven’t done it in a way that has translated into financial gains. READ MORE
Secret backrooms where deals are done in private: the realm of conspiracy theories? Or an increasingly large part of capitalism?
Since the financial crisis, some of the big winners have been private equity firms. They’ve snapped up bargains on everything from high street brands, to care homes and nurseries – and maybe even the house you own. READ MORE
Private equity is finally eating its vegetables.
For months, markets have been hand-wringing about private credit while quietly ignoring the obvious: equity sits below debt. Always has. “If you’re worried about private credit, and a lot of people are, you should be really worried about private equity,” I wrote in March. READ MORE
In artificial intelligence's funding bonanza, a tiny circle of startups can stack billion-dollar rounds in quick succession, while everyone else fights for what's left.
Less obvious is that the same squeeze is happening to the venture capitalists themselves. READ MORE
In the final days of SuperReturn in Berlin, SpaceX priced the largest IPO in history, raising $75 billion at a valuation near $1.75 trillion, and later growing to over $2 trillion. I had spent that week in Berlin and the week before at South Summit in Madrid.
For a decade I have argued that talent is global and capital is provincial.
Two weeks of conferences left me with a sharper version of the same point: tech has globalized, but the money has not (yet) caught up. READ MORE
Lately, I’ve been hearing the same question from some of the most sophisticated investors I know.
We know superintelligence is coming soon –maybe as early as 2027. So what do you invest in when AI will solve everything? READ MORE
The venture capital industry is pumping record levels of private cash into American defense technology companies — considered a controversial investment in the past — in a way that national security insiders say is transforming the U.S. military industrial landscape.
Defense technology companies such as Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Saronic and a slew of others have raised more than $14.6 billion in private investment so far this year, according to Crunchbase, an artificial intelligence-powered dashboard and search engine that tracks private and public companies. READ MORE
The playbook that built private equity returns over the past decade is losing its edge. Multiple expansion has compressed. Leverage is more expensive and harder to access. Market timing is less reliable. What remains, and what now accounts for a growing share of fund-level returns, is operational value creation: margin expansion, cash discipline, and the capabilities to sustain both.
Operating partners often feel this pressure most directly. Many own the performance trajectory of assets from day one. And they know that episodic cost cutting—a round of procurement savings here, a hiring freeze there—does not produce the kind of durable, defensible margin improvement that holds up at exit. READ MORE
Over the past few days, some Silicon Valley tech founders have taken to the internet to publicly roast the venture capitalists they once pitched.
The kefuffle began last week when Greg Isenberg, the host of "The Startup Ideas Podcast," posted to X about his experience raising a $15 million Series A.
"12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going," Isenberg wrote, referring to an unnamed general partner. READ MORE
In recent days, founders and founders-turned-investors took to X to share horror stories about being mistreated by VCs. Their complaints ranged from VCs falling asleep during pitch meetings to investors suggesting a founder fire a co-founder.
Brendan Foody, co-founder of the AI talent platform Mercor, which was last valued at $10 billion, went so far as to call out Sequoia, arguably one of the most elite VC firms in the world. READ MORE
Venture capital is buying its way into the artificial intelligence transformation that enterprise software hasn’t delivered. Instead of selling AI tools to companies, venture firms are buying legacy companies outright and rebuilding them around AI from the inside.
The bet puts VCs on offense and leaves traditional private equity, which spent the last cycle buying enterprise software at peak prices, on defense. READ MORE
The euphoria surrounding AI has surged to its next exhilarating – and dangerous – level.
Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, took its first step towards a US stock market listing on Monday after privately filing paperwork with regulators. READ MORE
“Lame cold pitch from the US”.
That was the subject line of a recent email with a clear ask that actually caught my attention.
And as an investor who receives dozens of startup pitches and even more follow-ups each week that’s saying something. It wasn’t in a professional tone and it wasn’t polished, rather subtly self-deprecating but undeniably honest. READ MORE
For decades, venture capital has operated on a relatively simple premise: Back exceptional founders early, provide capital, open doors and help companies scale. In prior technology waves—cloud computing, mobile, or software as a service—that formula often worked. Investors did not need to be operators themselves to add value. Pattern recognition, networks and conviction were enough to matter.
Artificial intelligence is changing that model. READ MORE
A decade ago, defense tech was considered a niche, even controversial corner of venture capital, with few startup investors daring to place bets on companies working with the military.
How times have changed. Already this year, more than $14.6 billion in venture investment has gone into companies in Crunchbase’s military, national security and law enforcement categories, blowing past the sector’s previous annual record of $9.6 billion raised in all of 2025. READ MORE
There is a moment before every flight that matters more than takeoff itself.
It is not dramatic or cinematic. From the outside, it often looks like nothing at all. A pilot reviews the conditions, studies the route, checks the aircraft, evaluates the weather, considers alternatives, and then makes a decision: go or no-go.
That decision is deceptively simple to underestimate because nothing visibly happens. If the answer is “go”, the flight proceeds. If the answer is “no-go”, the aircraft stays on the ground, the plan changes, and life moves on. READ MORE
Early-stage venture firm 1517 Fund has sued the California regulator that’s overseeing the delayed rollout of a controversial new portfolio diversity disclosure requirement, claiming the law is unconstitutional.
It’s the sharpest pushback yet from VCs, who have called the rules an overreach that burdens investors and the startups they fund. The complaint appears to be the first lawsuit over the California Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Act. READ MORE
Wall Street may be on the cusp of one of the most consequential initial public offering (IPO) waves in years. SpaceX is preparing what could be the largest IPO in history, potentially valuing the rocket maker and xAI owner at close to $1.75 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are also weighing listings that could command valuations measured in the hundreds of billions.
The key question is not about size or spectacle. It is structural: Can a concentrated, space- and AI-led IPO wave extend beyond a handful of marquee names and meaningfully unlock the broader M&A market? READ MORE
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