Daily Musings

Of Billion Dollar Unicorns and My Two Cents

Philip Kurzrock
September 11, 2024 • Today's Reading Time: 4 minutes

Evening all

with each of the USD 14.3bn, European courts have fined Apple to pay Ireland, my coffee looks more and more like Guinness. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

My notes below.

Cheers
Philip

AENU rings final close on EUR 170m fund to support European Seed and Series A GreenTech / CleanTech founders. LPs include EIF, KfW, Rentenbank and a number of founders active in the space, including Planetly entrepreneur Anna Alex. FOs also on board: Bertelsmann & E.R. Capital Holding. Total time to fundraise: 2 years. The team has co-invested alongside Creandum, 2150 and Balderton in companies such as alcemy, trawa, Monta and Hometree
London local tem. bags EUR 12.4m in fresh Series A capital. Led by Atomico (which recently disclosed their largest fundraise ever @ USD 1.2bn). The company’s algo aims to directly match SMEs with renewable energy generators - 22,000 renewable generators in the UK - in real-time. tem.’s AI forecasts fluctuations within energy supply and demand and facilitates 1.8bn matches daily. The value prop.: Affordable, secure and clean energy for SMEs
ICG clocks in their fifth direct lending vehicle with USD 17bn in capital
French secondaries investors BEX Capital gets USD 765m for their fifth vintage as LPs are continuing to press their GPs to turn TVPI into DPI. Appetite for the strategy is clear: Fundraising only took 4 months

US CPI came in a bit hotter than traders expected. Core CPI +0.3% MoM in August vs. +0.2% consensus. YoY core CPI now @ 3.2%. Core Services contributed the largest chunk of the increase. Traders dialled back their 50bps FED cut bets - markets priced at 29bps. All eyes on tomorrow’s PPI reading.

Apollo’s preferred recession meter (as the Sahm Rule and the Yield Curve Inversion Rule seem to not do the trick anymore) has cooled towards 30% for the US

After yesterday’s US presidential debate markets placing the odds of seeing Kamala Harris become POTUS in November. Trump Media investors likely unamused as their shares have cut their value by approx. 20% in the last two days.