UCB pays up to $2.2bn for Candid Therapeutics, doubling down on T-cell engagers in autoimmune disease
UCB pays up to $2.2bn for Candid Therapeutics, doubling down on T-cell engagers in autoimmune disease

The Belgian pharma is buying a two-year-old San Diego biotech for $2bn upfront, the second TCE bet it has placed in months. The thesis: B-cell killers built for cancer can rewire how autoimmune diseases are treated. Candid Therapeutics is two years old…

Skio never hired a sales team, never ran an ad, and just sold for $105 million cash to the company it was built to replace
Skio never hired a sales team, never ran an ad, and just sold for $105 million cash to the company it was built to replace

Kennan Frost dropped out of college, worked as an engineer at Pinterest, had a panic attack, quit, applied to Y Combinator in 2020, and by his own account failed his way through the programme until a pivot to subscription payments changed everything. F…

The venture fund that spent $4.6 billion in a year just raised $6 billion more
The venture fund that spent $4.6 billion in a year just raised $6 billion more

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, closed a $6 billion growth fund on 1 May, its largest ever and its fourth dedicated late-stage vehicle. The majority of the capital, $4.5 billion, came from limited partners including s…

Blue Owl made 10x its money on SpaceX and has already sold half its position
Blue Owl made 10x its money on SpaceX and has already sold half its position

The alternative asset manager’s co-CEO disclosed the returns on a Q1 earnings call, framing the SpaceX gain as a hedge against potential software credit losses from AI disruption, a revealing window into how private credit firms are navigating the AI e…

SPRIND opens applications for €125M competition to build Europe’s first frontier AI labs
SPRIND opens applications for €125M competition to build Europe’s first frontier AI labs

The Next Frontier AI Challenge, announced at EurIPS in December, explicitly tells applicants not to try to catch up with OpenAI, but to leapfrog to the next architectural S-curve, with up to €1 billion in follow-on funding dangled for the three winning…

More banks join SoftBank’s $40 billion OpenAI loan as syndication enters soft-launch phase
More banks join SoftBank’s $40 billion OpenAI loan as syndication enters soft-launch phase

HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Intesa Sanpaolo are among eight institutions that have submitted commitments as sub-underwriters, in one of the largest tests of creditor appetite for AI-linked debt. The $40 billion bridge loan SoftBank signed in March to fund i…

NVIDIA and Atlassian back Legora’s $600m Series D in a $50m extension that values the legal AI startup at $5.6 billion
NVIDIA and Atlassian back Legora’s $600m Series D in a $50m extension that values the legal AI startup at $5.6 billion

The Stockholm-founded company, which crossed $100m in ARR in 18 months, has now raised $866m in total, and Nvidia’s entry marks the chip giant’s first investment in legal tech. Legora has added $50 million to its Series D round, bringing the total to $…

Earlybird closes €360M Fund VIII, its largest ever, with a new perpetual ownership model and a deeptech-first thesis
Earlybird closes €360M Fund VIII, its largest ever, with a new perpetual ownership model and a deeptech-first thesis

The Berlin firm, founded in 1997, has raised a new fund every three to four years through every market cycle. Fund VIII is oversubscribed, manages €2.5 billion across strategies, and bets heavily on AI infrastructure, foundation models, and deeptech. E…

Cognizant to acquire AI infrastructure specialist Astreya for $600 million
Cognizant to acquire AI infrastructure specialist Astreya for $600 million

The deal, Cognizant’s fourth major acquisition in 18 months, is designed to plug a specific gap in its AI builder strategy: the ability to design, build, and run the physical data centre infrastructure that enterprise AI actually runs on. Cognizant has…

Spain’s Solaria raises €300m to power data centres with solar and battery storage
Spain’s Solaria raises €300m to power data centres with solar and battery storage

The Spanish solar developer is betting that co-locating renewable generation with battery storage adjacent to data centres is the answer to AI’s power hunger, and investors are oversubscribed at 6.7x. Europe has a data centre problem. Electricity grids…