📶 Blackstone: world's largest AI infrastructure investor

Blackstone's latest takeover plan, the opportunity for LP stakes selling, and the newest agtech unicorn

August 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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TL;DR:

HEADLINES
Blackstone’s infrastructure master plan 🔀

Master Plan Bladesmiths GIF by DefyTV

  • Blackstone to become world’s largest AI infrastructure investor (Venture Capital Journal)

  • Opportunity for ‘significant’ LP selling activity in coming months (Venture Capital Journal)

  • An Eric Schmidt Investment Firm Crumbles After Mismanagement, Soured Romance (The Information)

  • Sequoia-backed Knowde raises Series C at a valuation cut (TechCrunch)

  • Superfruit Startup AgroVision Minted Agtech’s Newest Unicorn (Crunchbase)

  • The 10 Biggest Rounds Of July: Skild AI And Element Biosciences Lead Hot Month (Crunchbase)

  • Bill Ackman shelves Pershing Square IPO after lack of investor interest made him cut it from $25 billion to $2 billion (Fortune)

  • Meta’s shares soar after revenue growth reassures investors on AI plan (FT)

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FUNDS

Name

Fund Size

Fund Number

Kingswood

$1.5b

III

Menlo Ventures

$100m

I

Graham Partners

$1.8b

VI

DFJ Growth

$1m

V

Trill Impact

$98.217m

I

Alliance Consumer Growth

$160m

V

P.S. 👉 If you’re looking to get a new VC job … 

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RECAP
What else you missed this week 📆

Name

Description

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📶 Who's making real money podcasting?

Plus Jay-Z's fund is thinking about a merger, the enterprise AI roadmap, and 93 non-obvious VC takeaways

📶 Europe VC trends (and charts)

What's new in Europe, big banks are training their own LLMs, and Anthropic gets accused of 'egregious' data scraping

📶 Confluence.VC Behind the Scenes: June + July 2024 Recap

What went right, what went wrong, the outlook, and where we could use some help

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RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in yesterday’s piece:

Are you actively investing in Europe?

 

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yes 🇪🇺 (11)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Nope 🇺🇸 (17)

28 Votes

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