Browsing: Venture capital

In October 2019, Google announced quantum supremacy: the creation of a special-purpose computer using quantum processors that could perform a calculation impossible for a digital computer. A computer Google named Sycamore resolved in just three minutes a computational challenge that would have required a digital computer 10,000 years. Remarkable asRead More

Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM, Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association I live in the state of Ohio, which has effectively been on lockdown since the beginning of March. Thankfully, most of my daily activities haven’t been disrupted, save for a few. However, my wife, who is always lookingRead More

Every venture exists to solve a problem. Since the dawn of the Covid-19 pandemic, pharmaceutical companies and investors have been scrambling to solve what has quickly become one of the biggest problems in modern history. But as the Financial Times observed earlier this month: “For most biotechs, success will beRead More

A new analyst report looks at what is in store for the private markets given Covid-19, an impending economic slowdown, and energy price volatility. It argues that we are entering a bear different from other bears. This bear market may be part of a transition that will increase the roleRead More

By Aaron Filbeck, CAIA, CFA, CIPM Associate Director, Content Development at CAIA Association Original Article: “Direct Investments” by Paul Kenny, AIAR Volume 8, Issue 3 Viewpoint Author: Aaron Filbeck, CFA, CAIA, CIPM Excerpted from the Alternative Investment Analyst Review, Volume 8, Issue 3 The Alternative Investment Analyst Review is theRead More

Unicorns (privately owned start-ups with a valuation of at least $1 billion) have long been the great sought-after beasts of the VC and PE worlds. But are they good for the planet? The unicorn boom was driven by the combination of easy credit and old-fashioned hype, combined with the wayRead More

Corum Group, a merger and acquisitions advisor, which works with privately held technology companies, has put out its annual report, which tells us a good deal about where the action is in the tech world outside of the public markets: focusing on strategic acquirers on the one hand and privateRead More

The quarterly investor report of VCapital Management Company looks at the opportunities for attractive returns for investors regardless of the cloudy economic conditions of 2020. It argues that alpha is to be found in the Midwest, in early-stage investing, and in two industries: healthcare/biomedical and intellectual property. Though the reportRead More

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest humans, attracted a good deal of attention last fall by saying, “Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tons of emissions.” He thereby put his finger on a key fault line amongst those who regard ESG investmentRead More

A theory is making the rounds, as expressed for example in a Forbes piece last month by David Trainer, that the US economy in particular (perhaps the economy of other nation states as well) is in the throes of a “unicorn bubble,” comparable to the housing derivatives bubble of aRead More

The term “greater fool theory” refers to the many circumstances in which speculators buy a (potentially) productive asset, basing their buy decision not on the asset’s operational value, but on the notion that there is a “greater fool” out there who will pay even more. The term refers, then, toRead More

PitchBook’s Adam Putz recently tackled the intensifying political scrutiny of Big Tech and the harm the scrutineers may do by trying to fix something that isn’t broken—the merger and acquisitions market for digital startups. The giants in the field (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google and its parent, Alphabet) are associated withRead More

By Bill Kelly, CEO, CAIA Association How do you turn a millennial into a capitalist? Sell her SNAP in the post-IPO market. A little hindsight here shows how ridiculous this all looked. The initial sellers of the shares were the founders and their VCs (just under 30% of the offering),Read More

A report from CREATE in collaboration with BNY Mellon looks at two related megatrends in investing—climate change and artificial intelligence. It asks in each case: how is this trend perceived in terms of opportunities and risks? What are the specific investment issues involved or solutions likely to be adopted? AndRead More

Equity rounds of VC-backed investment in the financial technology sector retreated in the second quarter of 2019, according to a new CB Insights report. Second-quarter fintech deals dropped 22% on a quarterly basis and 23% compared to the same quarter in 2018. Early seed deal share fell a five-quarter lowRead More

Cowen’s Capital Introduction Group has compiled information on what the endowment and foundation community is thinking about hedge funds and how best to invest in them. The Cowen paper on the subject begins with the observation, drawn from Preqin, that at present US-based E&Fs with more than $750 million inRead More

The agricultural sector is under pressure from several directions, including depressed commodity prices, increased regulation, climate change, and changes in consumer tastes. This pressure creates a demand for technological progress, and that in turn creates a market for agtech. Two years ago, Finisterre Ventures and Pitchbook combined their data gatheringRead More

Female Funders, a program within the venture capital company Highline BETA, with offices in both Canada and the United States, has produced a new Women in Venture report, which works with data gathered from more than 300 VC firms and corporate venture arms in both countries “to try to paintRead More

CB Insights, the New York-based machine intelligence platform, has just released its Global Insights Report Q1 2019. The report finds that in the first quarter of 2019, financial technology companies backed by venture capitalists closed 445 deals globally, raising $6.3 billion. The sheer number of deals, then, was up quarter-over-quarterRead More

The relationship between US venture capitalists and Swedish startup companies is the subject of a recent working paper from researchers at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. This is a striking field of research, if only because in pop culture terms the US is often considered the haven ofRead More

Yes, venture capital manager, we understand that you want a piece of that unicorn yonder. But does the unicorn want you? That is the question raised by a new paper from two scholars affiliated with New York University, Yannis Bakos and Hanna Halaburda, “Funding New Ventures with Digital Tokens.” Specifically,Read More

The March 2019 issue of Venture Capital includes a largely pessimistic article about “the evolving environment for the formation and financing of new firms.” Written by Martin Kenney and John Zysman, the article bears the title ”Unicorns, Cheshire Cats, and the New Dilemmas of Entrepreneurial Finance.” Kenney and Zysman areRead More

“With change happening at an unprecedented pace, it is fitting that alternative investment firms are strategically focused on leveraging diverse perspectives in these disruptive times,” says KPMG Chairman and CEO Lynne Doughtie, “The Call to Act,” a new paper that looks at the roles of women in the alternative investmentRead More

A new study of hedge funds that are engaged in the venture capital space, written by George O. Aragon, Emma Li, and Laura Lindsey, contends that some hedge funds quite successfully exploit their expertise in the value of the publicly owned portion of specific industries when they enter the private/ventureRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

On Dec. 6, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event concluded. CAIA was a sponsor of this event, which was billed as “the world’s gateway to Japanese private equity and venture capital.” This is the second part and conclusion of our interview with Jeff Diehl, managing director at AdamsRead More

On Wednesday, December 5, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event convenes. CAIA is a sponsor of this event. Jeff Diehl, managing partner at Adams Street Partners, a multi-national investment manager with more than $35 billion in assets under management, is attending. He will participate in a panel WednesdayRead More

By Diane Harrison We’ve reached that time of the year again, when prognosticators are producing all manner of publications centering on how the 2019 investment landscape will likely take shape. Robeco issued a white paper in October, ‘Turbulence Ahead: Investment Outlook 2019,’ in which they state ‘…next year we expectRead More

KPMG, the auditing giant based in the Netherlands, has put out a white paper on the “digitization mandate” in the alternative investment space.  It maintains that fund managers who “dawdle” in digitizing their business are acting foolishly, falling behind the expectations of their actual and potential investors. Consider fees. PreqinRead More

In a new report on the condition of women-owned businesses, part of an annual ongoing examination of business trends by American Express, researchers first take a big picture view (1972 to the present) and then do a swoop-down into the details of 2018.   The conclusion of the study isRead More

PitchBook has posted its 2018 VC Unicorn Report. The introduction explains the meaning of the term. (It has only been in use in its financial sense since 2013, so explanations may still be deemed necessary.) “Unicorn” refers to an entity upon which the private investment markets have bestowed a valuationRead More

In a new study by Harvard Business School scholars looks into the performance of LPs invested with private equity over four decades. In the paper, Investing Outside the Box, the scholars found that it is generally better to invest inside the box. Specifically, they found that the performance of alternativeRead More

Illuminate Ventures, an early-stage high-tech VC firm, has posted a paper by its founder and managing partner, Cindy Padnos, on “gender differences in entrepreneurship.” The paper begins with the observation that nearly half of the Illuminate portfolio companies have a woman as a co-founder. This doesn’t mean of course thatRead More

Finistere Ventures, a venture capital firm that describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” has teamed up with Pitchbook to produce a dataset that would enable “clear insights into financing activity and metrics in the agtech sector.” The result was the Agtech InvestmentRead More

The Association of Asian American Investment Managers holds its Chicago Regional event on Thursday, July 26 at the offices of law firm Sidley Austin LLP, One South Dearborn, beginning at 3 and continuing until 7. AAAIM confidently proclaims that its line-up of panelists is a collection of “rock stars.” AmongRead More

A new book by the Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, works as a compelling test case in how the hunger for the next “unicorn,” a hunger that has been a feature in alternative investing for years now, can go badlyRead More

The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) has posted what it calls an “overview” of the VC and PE Markets in that country in 2017. It reports growth in both of those markets, although growth at distinct velocities. The report tells us that, on the VC side, CanadaRead More

ARA Law, a firm based in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, has issued a paper on private equity and venture capital in that country. In a foreword, firm founder Rajesh N. Begur observes that there is a positive dynamic now at work in India’s economy, one that in his view “canRead More

A recent publication from Ceres, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting sustainability as a goal in both investing and corporate governance, looks at the value that early-stage clean energy products offer venture capitalists. The publication is the work of a team of five “lead authors and key contributors,” including threeRead More

Preqin has named its top 100 Venture Capital firms, ordered by the amount of capital each firm has raised in the last 10 years. The top 10, with their headquarters city, are as follows: Tiger Global Management, New York New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Park Sequoia Capital, Menlo Park DST Global,Read More

An increase in total buy-out investments proved a big factor in the growth through 2016 of the private equity and venture capital market in New Zealand. A new report looks at this growth and concludes that fund-raising activity there has reached a milestone, hitting again a levels not seen sinceRead More

The number of public companies listed on U.S. exchanges peaked in 1996. Due to mergers on the one hand and de-listings on the other, factors far offsetting new initial public offerings, this number has fallen drastically since then, to less than half of peak. Part of the reason for thisRead More

Are funds of funds a valuable form of intermediation? Robert Harris, of the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business, and three other distinguished scholars looked at this question in a Darden Business School Working Paper, and they decided that, at least with regard specifically to the role of FOFsRead More

Thomas J. Chemmanur of Boston College, Carroll School of Management, and two other scholars looked into the issue whether local venture capitalists “play well together” with international VCs, and vice versa. The resulting paper, in the latest issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, suggest that entrepreneurs benefit by bringingRead More

Yale, in their 2015 annual report issued this month has broken out their private equity allocation into two distinct segments: Leveraged Buyouts and Venture Capital.  See: This is the first time in many years they’ve offered that level of detail.  And they’ve given the whole report a VC-and-entrepreneurial theme, supplementing theRead More

As a general rule, politicians [mostly] on the Democratic side benefit by raising the issue of the taxation of carried interest during campaigns and then quietly letting it die, as their donors expect, when the legislature is actually working on tax bills. It's a way of signaling who is a "populist" and who isn't. Read More

Revolution is underway in the energy world. For investors, one of the most unexpected facts about this revolution is that it permeates precisely those portions of the energy sector long thought sleepy and conventional: the fossil fuels. Read More

A new report from Celent discusses the as-yet unimplemented Title III of the JOBS Act. Celent's Isabella Fonseca offers suggestions for how both wealth managers and tech providers might benefit. Read More

The 2013 performance of the private equity industry, given any of several metrics, was quite strong. Why? In part because the exit environment has been very good. Read More

As always, government wants revenue, and by what is now a reflex action heads have turned to the issue of carried interest. Faille speculates that little, if anything, will happen at the federal level, but that we may soon see a shift in the location of the action. Read More