Your Custom Text Here
Private equity and venture capital aren't leaning into a Blue Wave, according to an Axios analysis of campaign donations made by political action committees affiliated with the American Investment Council and National Venture Capital Association.
Why it matters: Political alignment could impact issues like expanded retail investor access to alt investments, crypto market structure, qualified investment definitions, and AI regulation. READ MORE
Tennessee’s Supreme Court declined to allow private equity and other investors to directly buy stakes in the state’s law firms, while signaling openness to other regulatory changes related to the practice of law.
The court in an Oct. 2 order said it will not change the state’s ban on non-lawyer ownership of law firms, maintaining widely observed US limitations on who can own and profit from legal services. The decision is a contrast to the minority of US states where law firms owned by non-lawyer investors, such as Arizona’s alternative business structures (ABSs), have their Supreme Courts’ blessing. READ MORE
The private equity industry has shown particular interests in defense and data centers. Twenty-nine percent of PE-acquired companies in H1 of 2026 comprise entities providing goods and services to the defense sector, while another 29% provide components for data centers or to incorporate AI into products. READ MORE
The US private equity industry enters the second half of 2026 amid a landscape defined by structural evolution, regulatory recalibration, and the continued maturation of alternative investment strategies. While fundraising remains constrained relative to the 2021 peak, secondary transactions have surged to record levels, continuation vehicles have become a primary liquidity mechanism, and private credit has expanded well beyond direct lending into a multi-strategy asset class. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment has shifted meaningfully under new Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) leadership, and the push to democratise retail investor access to private markets is reshaping fund structures and compliance considerations. READ MORE
You might condense down the challenge of venture capital to this: you must invest with conviction in the face of complexity and confusion. Amid shifting industrial policy, corporate strategy, market hype, you must commit — both in terms of money and time — to half-formed ideas and technologies. This is the challenge for any investor and even more so for those placing bets on startups on behalf of a corporation.
The successful corporate investors we interview for GCV all have found ways to manage complexity while holding onto a guiding strand. Take John Banta at Blue Venture Fund, for example, with 36 limited partners to manage — all Blue Cross Blue Shield companies and affiliates. Many corporate investors struggle with navigating the expectations of just one corporation, let alone three dozen, all wanting strategic benefits and insights from the portfolio. READ MORE
Startups focused on artificial intelligence development and deployment continued to attract substantial venture capital investment in September, with a particular emphasis on AI security and infrastructure.
According to reporting by CRN, AI-focused startups secured significant funding in September, with notable investments in companies like Cyera and Island, which raised $400 million each for their data security and enterprise browser platforms, respectively. READ MORE
Anthropic wants stock market investors to value it at more than $2 trillion. Last year, the company behind Claude AI lost $42 billion.
Both numbers sit in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, the document a company files before selling shares to the public. Reuters reviewed it on Monday. Here are eight places where the pitch and the numbers pull apart. READ MORE
I have spent much of my career leading technology and transformation programs where protecting data was treated as a fundamental part of good governance. We controlled who could access it, where it could move and how it could be used. AI has made me question whether that boundary is still sufficient.
The question I believe boards, CIOs and private equity investors now need to confront is not simply who owns the data but who owns what an AI system learns from it. READ MORE
Lawmakers Target Private Equity Greed
This month saw the re-introduction of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, a bill that would (among other things) require PE firms to be responsible for the debt burdens of the companies they control, increase transparency about the management fees they charge, and create new protections for workers and consumers. CEPR’s Eileen Appelbaum pointed out that it also cracks down on common tactics that have devastated health care providers:
“The Stop Wall Street Looting Act removes the ability of private equity funds to extract cash from companies they acquire via sale-leaseback deals, dividend recapitalizations, and monitoring fees. These legal but unscrupulous practices enrich PE firms and their investors. But they undermine the financial stability of the companies they acquire, squeeze their workers, and reduce the quality of their products and services, hurting employees, customers, and communities.” READ MORE
President Donald Trump picked an odd political moment to remove guardrails from the private equity industry. A July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that a 65 percent majority agreed with the statement, “We need guard rails for Wall Street firms like private equity because otherwise they maximize short term profits for themselves, cut jobs, and reduce the quality of products and services.” There was surprisingly little partisan difference on this point. A 59 percent majority of Republicans agreed with a 78 percent majority of Democrats. READ MORE
Anyone who has spent significant time in biotech understands that periods of abundant capital are never permanent. The industry moves through cycles of enthusiasm and retrenchment, but the current environment signals a meaningful rebound in investor appetite. After the funding constraints of 2022 to 2024, biotech venture investment rebounded strongly in late 2025, supported by renewed M&A activity, improving public markets, and sustained demand for innovative therapeutic assets, and 2026 is looking like a banner year. READ MORE
This week’s list of the largest U.S. startup funding rounds was pretty much all about AI. That includes the biggest financing — a $1 billion round for Instinct, a developer of AI assistants for everyday tasks — as well as most of the rest of the Top 10. Other large fundraisers include EliseAI, which is deploying AI for the home rental sector, and Armadin, an AI cybersecurity startup. READ MORE
Looking across Poets&Quants’ lists of the highest-funded MBA startups over the last several years, the problems seem to be getting harder.
More founders are pushing into AI, deep tech, biotech and advanced manufacturing. Rather than looking for market gaps and trying to fill them (though plenty still are), more MBA entrepreneurs are trying to solve big world problems with capabilities that don’t yet exist. Across our 2026 list, founders are going after problems that require laboratories, factories, years of research and enormous amounts of capital. READ MORE
As venture firms mature and fundraising becomes more institutionalized, building the right investor relations function is increasingly becoming a critical part of long-term growth. The best time to hire an investor relations leader is before you urgently need one, according to a recent report from SPMB’s Suzanne Heske and Emily Leder.
“LP relationships take years to build, and waiting until a fundraise is underway leaves a new hire little time to develop the trust and institutional credibility that drive commitments,” said Ms. Heske. “For many venture capital firms, the natural window to hire is between Fund III and Fund IV. In fact, 52 percent of our IR searches occur at precisely that stage.” READ MORE
For Raymond Zheng, senior managing director at Honda Xcelerator Ventures, the Japanese carmaker’s investment arm, the central question in corporate venture capital is not whether a startup can attract funding. It is whether the technology can make the difficult journey from investment portfolio to operating business.
That distinction has reshaped his view of CVC. Early in his career, Zheng saw corporate venture as a way to learn about emerging technologies, maintain optionality and hedge against an uncertain future. But working inside a large industrial organisation changed the emphasis. READ MORE
My interest in venture capital (VC) began long before I ever imagined building an actual venture capital fund. In college, I opened a women’s clothing store and quickly learned that having a great idea was only part of what it took to build a business. I needed capital to grow, and finding that money wasn’t easy. That experience stayed with me.
Years later, when I began looking more closely at who gets funded in America—and who doesn’t—I realized that the entrepreneurial challenges I had encountered were part of a much larger story. So I started digging into the numbers. READ MORE
Ask any sponsor which hire matters most after the CEO, and most will say the CFO. Yet many portfolio companies still treat the finance seat as a reporting role. In today's market, that gap is expensive.
Holding periods are longer and exit windows are less predictable. As a result, returns increasingly depend on how the business runs, not on financial engineering. The CFO sits at that intersection, turning the investment thesis into day-to-day decisions. READ MORE
With public equity markets near all-time highs and the future uncertain, we believe private equity can be a meaningful path to building wealth over time. It offers the chance to be an active owner with direct control over how value is created across a more diversified opportunity set.
For investors considering an allocation, or revisiting one, the considerations below are a good place to start a conversation about where the opportunity sits now. READ MORE
Private equity firms examine every line of the financial model and pressure-test the commercial thesis from multiple angles. However, an assessment of the leadership team is often the least rigorous part of diligence. Deal teams will spend weeks validating a revenue forecast and only a matter of hours forming a view on the CEO expected to deliver it, according to a recent report from ECA Partners’ Samantha Martinez. “The consequence shows up after close,” the study explained. “A thesis that depended on a management team’s ability to move fast stalls because the team was never built for the pace PE demands. By the time the gap gets discovered, options are narrow and the clock has already begun.”
“Leadership is a pre-close risk workstream, not a post-close discovery,” the ECA Partners report said. “The firms that treat management due diligence with the same rigor they apply to financial and commercial diligence de-risk execution before they own the asset, and they walk into day one with a talent plan already built.” READ MORE
AI is reshaping innovation investments.
Artificial intelligence is fueling a rebound in investment in innovation, with corporate research and development spending reaching record highs, the United Nations said Tuesday.
The U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization said more money was going into venture capital, even as the number of VC deals was shrinking and investment was becoming increasingly concentrated on AI firms. READ MORE
Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.