Private Markets Update & Deal Flow

Since Musk confirmed the IPO rumours in mid-December, roughly USD 14B has flooded into funds already holding SpaceX on their books. That's not cautious allocation — that's a stampede. Actual allocations remain vanishingly thin, the queue is long, and the float is short. So investors are doing what they always do when the front door is locked: going round the back. Funds like Scottish Mortgage, Edinburgh Worldwide, and Baillie Gifford US Growth have quietly flipped from trading at discounts to their NAV to outright premiums — not because their portfolios improved, but because investors are paying extra for the SpaceX line item. At least 14 new ETF filings have landed in recent weeks. EchoStar, which received a SpaceX equity stake as part of a spectrum deal, has reportedly climbed more than 500% over the past year.

SpaceX is targeting a valuation of at least USD 1.8T — a step down from the USD 2T figure circulating in April. The raise could hit USD 75B, making it the largest IPO in history. Marketing kicks off around June 4, pricing expected June 11, with Goldman, Morgan Stanley, BofA, Citi, and JPMorgan on the cover. Ticker: SPCX on Nasdaq.

The pitch goes well beyond rockets. SpaceX is framing itself as an AI infrastructure and orbital data platform, with a claimed total addressable market of USD 28.5T. The hard number investors will stare at: SpaceX swung from a USD 791M profit in 2024 to a USD 4.94B loss in 2025, even as revenue grew from USD 14B to USD 18.7B — partly explained by the February acquisition of xAI.

The cap table story is equally compelling. SpaceX operates 10,262 satellites through Starlink. The next-largest commercial operator, OneWeb, has 632. This isn't a competitive lead — it's a different category entirely. June 12 isn't just a liquidity event. It's the moment the market has to decide what SpaceX actually is, and what that's worth.

The signal: serious market participants are drawing parallels to 2021 — the last time IPO mania reached this pitch, just before the 2022 correction erased a great deal of it. The street is now wondering whether the smartest trade was the one you made six months ago. For those who haven't, the window closes June 11.

Russia has passed a law letting Sberbank, the Russian Cash Collection Association, and the Special Postal Service operate their own anti-drone defences. The optics are striking, but the substance is more interesting. This is Moscow quietly admitting something the street has suspected for months: Ukraine's long-range drone campaign has stretched Russian air defense so thin that the Kremlin is outsourcing parts of the job to the institutions themselves. The military can't be everywhere; the territory is enormous; and the targets — financial plumbing, cash logistics, state communications — are exactly the ones you don't want smoldering on the evening news.

The bigger question is what this tells us about the global counter-drone trade. Drones are cheap. Defending against them is not. And every time a Ukrainian loitering munition finds a Russian refinery or substation, the case for Western counter-UAS systems gets a little easier to make. Enter Anduril, which is increasingly looking like the purest listed-adjacent play on this thesis. The company's stack — Lattice, Sentry, Pulsar, Roadrunner, Anvil — covers the full detect-track-jam-kill chain. The US Army contract ceiling reportedly runs up to USD 20B. Anduril is also supplying loitering munitions to Ukraine via a UK contract, and its European footprint is expanding through the Rheinmetall partnership.

The plot thickens when you realise this isn't just a defence story — it's an infrastructure story, an insurance story, and eventually a corporate security story. If Russian banks are arming up, you can bet boardrooms in Frankfurt, Riyadh, and Singapore are at least asking the question.

Russia's pain is, in a fairly direct sense, Anduril's product-market fit. Pre-IPO allocation remains open — contact us to discuss current availability.

The European defence-tech gold rush just produced another eye-catching number. Stark, the Berlin-based kamikaze drone maker founded in 2024, is reportedly in talks to raise at least EUR 300M at a valuation of around EUR 2.5B — more than double the EUR 1B-plus tag it carried earlier this year. Same calendar year, double the price. That tells you everything about where European capital is flowing right now.

Stark builds single-use autonomous strike drones, with its flagship Virtus — a VTOL loitering munition with AI-assisted navigation, 100km range, and a 5kg warhead — already deployed in Ukraine and now contracted to the Bundeswehr. The cap table reads like a who's-who of people who tend to know things first: Peter Thiel, the NATO Innovation Fund, In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture arm) and Sequoia Capital. Not tourist money. The Bundeswehr deal alone carries a potential ceiling of EUR 2.86B; a second contract with Germany for the new NATO brigade in Lithuania adds further revenue visibility.

The story isn't frictionless. Virtus reportedly stumbled in British and German military trials last year — the kind of detail that would normally give LPs pause. But when your home government writes a EUR 269M cheque and puts you next to Helsing (raising at USD 18B) in the Bundeswehr procurement, trial hiccups become footnotes. Stark is also expanding into anti-drone tech via a laser-defence partnership with Inleap Photonics — a smart hedge into a market as interesting as drones themselves. The bigger question: is EUR 2.5B a ceiling, or just another waypoint?

Why it matters: Stark and Helsing together are building the European answer to Anduril — sovereign, NATO-aligned, and moving at startup speed. With defence budgets still expanding and the Ukraine conflict rewriting procurement priorities, today's EUR 2.5B may look modest within 12 months. Watch the Thiel political angle — it's the one risk the cap table can't fully price.

Anthropic has closed a USD 65B funding round at a valuation of USD 965B — overtaking OpenAI's last reported valuation of USD 852B and briefly making it the most valuable private AI company in the world. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, with D.E. Shaw, Blackstone, and DST Global also joining. By all accounts the deal came together fast — a signal of just how hot demand for top-tier AI exposure has become.

The growth story behind the raise is hard to argue with. Anthropic expects USD 10.9B in revenue for Q2 alone — more than double the prior quarter — and is reportedly approaching its first profitable quarter. The annualised run rate is said to be on track to pass USD 50B by end of next month. For context, the company was doing USD 4B annualised as recently as July last year. That is not a gradual ramp. That is a vertical line.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI alumni, Anthropic has carved out a strong position in enterprise AI through its Claude models, with a deliberate focus on coding, cybersecurity, and business productivity. The bigger picture: two AI companies, both not yet public, are now being valued in the hundreds of billions and both are reportedly eyeing IPOs as early as this autumn. The street is now wondering who blinks first on the IPO — and whether these valuations hold once the public market gets a proper look at the books.

Why it matters: the race to own the AI layer before it goes public is compressing fast. Goldbach Capital has pre-IPO access to Anthropic — reach out now before the window narrows further.

New Glenn — the flagship rocket Blue Origin has spent years and billions building — exploded on a Florida launchpad during a pre-launch test, creating what witnesses described as a large fireball. The company called it an anomaly. The footage called it something more dramatic. All personnel were accounted for, and no payload was onboard at the time.

The timing couldn't be worse. The rocket was being prepared for its fourth launch, tasked with carrying satellites for Amazon's Kuiper network — the broadband constellation supposed to go toe-to-toe with Starlink. That mission is now on hold, and the bigger question is how long. New Glenn is central to everything Blue Origin is trying to become: a credible, reliable launch provider competing with SpaceX's Falcon 9. The problem is that credible and reliable is precisely what the rocket has struggled to prove.

This follows an already uncomfortable April, when New Glenn's third launch saw its upper stage underperform, leaving an AST SpaceMobile satellite in the wrong orbit where it eventually burned up on re-entry. Two missions in a row, two problems. The gap between Blue Origin and SpaceX isn't closing — it's widening. NASA Artemis and Pentagon national security payload customers will be watching closely.

The contrarian read: every Blue Origin stumble is a SpaceX moat expansion. Starlink's competitive position in launch, connectivity, and defence-grade communications compounds with each competitor setback.

Private capital's appetite for music rights is only getting louder. Blackstone has sold Recognition Music Group — a 45,000-song catalog including works tied to Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Leonard Cohen, and Mariah Carey — to a Sony-GIC joint venture for around USD 4B. And it's not a one-off. Francisco Partners is teeing up Kobalt Music Group for Primary Wave, while Pershing Square keeps circling Universal Music Group.

Why now? Streaming turned royalties into a spreadsheet. Once an asset class becomes trackable, institutional money follows — and music has officially crossed that line. The more interesting shift is what buyers plan to do with these catalogs. Passive royalty clipping is out. Pophouse — behind the ABBA Voyage show and a Tina Turner investment — is the template: turn legacy IP into live experiences, films, merchandise, and immersive formats. The catalog becomes a platform.

Media music is the next leg. Cutting Edge Group's joint venture with Warner Bros. Discovery sits on nearly a century of screen music, from Friends to Harry Potter. The logic is simple: streaming subscriptions are sticky, and nostalgia travels well in a downturn. The debate isn't whether music is investable anymore — it's who owns the catalogs that can be turned into something bigger than a royalty stream.

The signal: on-demand streaming rewards premium content, so blue-chip catalogs keep pricing up while second-tier rights may not get invited to the same party. The asset class is real — the dispersion risk is real too.