Pre-Money: July 29, 2024

 

Brought to you by Partners Finance, offering exclusive CRE investment opportunities

The Vibe

The week’s most important happenings

July keeps motoring, with another IPO, more deals and the Olympic Games. Here’s what’s on today’s radar screen:

  • Onestream’s turn to shine

  • Legal finally innovates

  • Cyber still pays

  • Secondaries for everyone

  • Effects of “Private for Longer”

  • and more

KPIs

The week’s top performance indicators

Based on publicly available data from FTSE, NASDAQ, CNN Business, & other third-party sources. As of July 26 market close.

Partner

Partners Opportunity Fund V: Driving Value Through Strategic Investments

Opportunity Fund V is designed for capital appreciation through a value-add strategy. Our approach focuses on identifying and enhancing underutilized properties to unlock their full potential and generate returns for investors.

The Strategy:

Diversified Portfolio: Assemble a diversified portfolio of industrial, retail, and office investments in major Texas markets and high-growth cities in the southeastern United States.

Value-Add and Core-Plus: Acquire assets with value-add or core-plus risk profiles that benefit from well-capitalized, sophisticated, and hands-on ownership.

Target Markets: Focus on markets with strong fundamentals and excellent supply-and-demand attributes to achieve risk-adjusted returns for investors.

Deal Size: Target deal sizes between $10 million and $75 million.

Opportunity Fund V offers a diversified portfolio of value-add industrial, flex, retail, and office properties. These properties are strategically acquired at a discount to replacement cost, aiming to generate income and capital appreciation.

Invest today at precfinance.com.

Dots & Lines

The week’s top takeaways

  • Onestream is the one: The IPO window keeps opening, slowly but surely. Onestream ($OS), a Michigan-based software company building financial management tools, and backed by PE giant KKR, went public Wednesday. The company raised $490M, with shares jumping 30% on the first day and ending the week up 40% for a market cap close to $6.4B. The 14 year-old business, whose products enable enterprises to run financial operations - reporting, tax, planning and more - reported $480M of annual recurring revenue (ARR) as of March 31st, and said it was growing at 37%. Its last venture round in 2021, led by D1 and Tiger Global, valued the company at $6B, so the offering was somewhat down in price from there, though the first days of trading more than made up for it. This long-awaited IPO result is a positive result for SaaS and an indication the market is increasingly ready for the backlog of unicorns waiting their turn, provided they are ready for it.

  • Boring tech is all the rage: Future tech like robots and self-driving cars have ruled the news this year. But boring tech in legal and compliance, once thought of as sectors that remain in the stone age, is coming to the fore. Clio, a platform that brings automation to law firms, raised a $900M Series F at a $3B valuation led by NEA, while lawyer co-pilot Harvey hauled in a $100M Series C at a price of $1.5B led by Google’s venture arm, GV. To evaluate and integrate all these efficiencies, firms may have to become more innovative, and startup sector leader Cooley hired a Chief Innovation Officer for the first time. It’s sensible that investors would focus on use cases like legal, where GenAI’s ability to distill and organize disparate and comprehensive information is likely to create major efficiencies. With $350M+ going into 55 deals in Q2 and exceeding last year’s total already, this sector is clearly on the rise.

  • Cyber is white-hot: At first glance, the massive Crowdstrike outage and Wiz rejecting Google’s $23B buyout offer seem bearish. But in fact, they both signal the space could be in its early innings. A host of contenders is positioning itself to prevent the next outage. Vanta, which makes tools to help companies manage compliance, regulatory and security, raised a $150M Series C led by Sequoia. Overall, $3.8B went into 171 deals in the sector during the second quarter alone. The stakes keep rising, and this week the US warned startups about emerging security threats centered on brain-drain from phony or real foreign investors. If an upstart can reject big tech’s overtures and a massive outage increases optimism, the space that keeps the Internet - and society - functioning is worth watching.

Smart Humans Podcast

In the latest episode of Smart Humans, Slava Rubin talks with Issuance's Darren Marble about equity crowdfunding, "Going Public" and storytelling for entrepreneurs.

Deal Points

A few items of interest

  • As venture firm fundraising continues on its slowest pace since 2015, only 56 funds have been formed by first-time managers, and emerging managers have only captured 23% of the capital

  • This looks to be the year of the secondary for private markets, with $68B of assets changing hands, a 60% boost over last year’s H1

  • The median company age at IPO is now 11 years, 40% higher than prior decades, and the “private for longer” era has numerous downstream externalities

  • A closer look at VP hopeful JD Vance’s stint in venture capital isn’t that impressive, with lawsuits, bankruptcies and a failed SPAC punctuating an admittedly short track record

  • While VP Kamala Harris’ proximity to tech through her California roots brings relationships along with a greater inclination to regulate the sector

  • New York-based mental health care platform Headway raised a $100M Series D led by Spark Capital, valuing the company at $2.3B

  • Cohere, a builder of LLMs based in Toronto, announced a raise that valued the company at $5.5B

  • Tampa, FL-based Astranis raised a $200M Series D led by a16z to build its next-gen broadband satellite

  • Feeling behind on all the AI jargon? Here’s a helpful cheat sheet to decode it

  • An illuminating profile of Sequoia’s Steward, Roelof Botha, his South African rugby background, early PayPal training and keeping the firm on top through downturns and new technology waves

**Sponsored link

Tough times to raise for unproven GPs, especially a Fund I, per Pitchbook

The Forecast

Looking ahead to this week

In an action-packed end to July, stay tuned for:

  • Earnings from Apple ($APPL), Cloudflare ($NET), DoorDash ($DASH), Meta ($META), PayPal ($PYPL) and Twilio ($TWLO)

  • Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Meeting Tuesday & Wednesday

  • US Q2 productivity measure on Thursday

  • July employment and wages reports on Friday

  • Will U.S. Men’s Basketball defend its Gold?

How'd we do with this week's issue?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.