What’s Happening. A View From The Castle.
“I told my friends I wanted to be taken seriously. They laughed. Mission failed”… PitchBook is predicting that venture capital investments in the crypto sector could exceed $18 billion in 2025.
Meme at your own risk… The all-time high closing price for meme stock AMC Entertainment Holdings: $551.38 (in 2021). Current price: $3.97.
“You just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running to see you again”… In Q1 of 2023 direct PE secondaries were trading at a 50% discount to their last funding round. Now they are only at a 12% discount.
“I’m on the highway to hell, no stop signs, speed limit, nobody’s gonna slow me down”… Data centers are forecasted to consume up to 12% of total US power by 2030, up from 3.5% today, as digital infrastructure investors deployed $40 billion in PE deals for data center and related assets in 2024, 12x the amount invested in 2016.
“It’s all over, your mission is a failure”… JP Morgan December 2023: “As we approach 2024, we expect both inflation data and economic demand to soften, as the tailwinds for growth and risk markets are fading. Overall, we are cautious on the performance of risky assets and the broader macro-outlook over the next 12 months, due to building monetary headwinds, geopolitical risks and expensive asset valuations.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again”… An all-time high 771,480 people in the US were reported homeless in 2024, up 18% from 2023.
Rub some dirt on it and stop crying… After a failed capital raise Embodied is closing down and its $800 robot for young children to help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development will soon be bricked, causing concerns about kids suffering an emotional toll when the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Customers are sharing videos of sad kids learning that their robot friend will stop playing with them.
And a Happy New Year… Bench, a Canada-based SaaS accounting platform that helped their small and medium-sized business customers store and manage bookkeeping and tax reporting documents, abruptly shut down, leaving over 35,000 US clients in the lurch. The startup had raised $113 million from high-profile VC and strategic investors.
“Baby you can drive my car, yes I’m gonna be a star…” It took 230 days for Xiaomi, a Chinese designer and manufacturer of smartphones, consumer electronics and home appliances, to build its first 100,000 electric vehicles. It took Tesla 7.5 years to achieve the same feat.
Birds of a feather flock together… The AI/machine learning sector accounted for $2 billion of the $4.7 billion generated in deal value from top VC firms in Q3.
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