Hello and welcome to Alts Cafe.
A curated pour of the week’s most important alt investing stories, customized and brewed to your liking.
Table of Contents
Highlights
- Startups & VC: 28 new unicorns arrive in April, 26 of them AI. AI startups raised $255 billion in Q1 alone, topping all of 2025.
- Real Estate: Dubai hotel occupancy is projected to fall to 10% in Q2 from 80% pre-war, as Brookfield and Alshaya launch a 480,000 square foot Dubai project, betting against Iran war risk-off
- Private Equity & Private Credit: Anthropic forms a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman, Apollo, Sequoia, and GIC to go after McKinsey
- Crypto: BlackRock readies two tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum
- International Investing: South Korea overtakes Canada as the world’s seventh-largest equity market
- Music & Film: Cannes opens with only 9% of competition films from the US
- Artwork: NYC Spring Art Week opens with Sotheby’s “The Now”, Frieze, and TEFAF testing market depth
- Sports: Amazon’s $19.8 billion NBA deal kicks off the biggest content investment in company history
- Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: An 1879 Coiled Hair Stella gold coin sells for $2.1 million, one of fourteen known
- Prediction Markets: a16z notes crypto VC capital is rotating into prediction markets as the next vertical
International Investing
Around the world…
- 🇰🇷 South Korea overtakes Canada as the world’s seventh-largest equity market on the AI memory boom
- 🇨🇳 Trump heads to Beijing with AI chip exports on the table, Jensen Huang notably left off the trip
- 🇳🇬 OPay targets a US listing at a $4 billion valuation
- 🇲🇽 Mexico’s MIP Real Assets eyes over $12 billion for renewable energy and highways
Startups & VC
- 28 new unicorns arrive in April, 26 of them AI. AI startups raised $255 billion in Q1 alone, topping all of 2025.
- Robinhood’s public venture fund attracts 150,000 retail investors after disclosing OpenAI exposure
- Cerebras lifts its IPO range to a $48.8 billion valuation, 20x oversubscribed
- DeepSeek raises over $3 billion at up to a $50 billion valuation led by China’s Big Fund
- Ramp talks to raise $750 million at a $40 billion valuation, double its level six months ago
- HawkEye 360 IPO pops 30% on day one as a bellwether for SpaceX
- Suno raises another $250 million at a $5 billion valuation
- Brazil’s Enter becomes Latin America’s first AI unicorn at $1.2 billion
- Span partners with Nvidia to host $500,000 of GPUs in family homes, subsidizing utility bills
- VC firms are hiring AI agent associates with backstories to replace junior analysts
- Brain-computer interface startups have absorbed $3 billion since 2024 with Neuralink at just 21 trial patients
Sports
- Amazon’s $19.8 billion NBA deal kicks off the biggest content investment in company history
- Bruin Capital takes a 15% stake in Matchroom at over £1 billion
Prediction Markets
- a16z notes crypto VC capital is rotating into prediction markets as the next vertical
Music & Film
- Cannes opens with only 9% of competition films from the US
- Red Hot Chili Peppers sell their recorded catalog to Warner for $300 million, anchoring Warner-Bain’s $1.2 billion iconic catalogs fund
- Universal sells half of its Spotify stake for $1.4 billion, sharing proceeds with artists
- SAG-AFTRA’s tentative AMPTP deal sets the first contractual rules for AI synthetic performers
- Five studios and Apple are bidding on EA’s Battlefield film rights in the year’s biggest IP war
- Sphere Entertainment posts Q1 revenue up 38% on Wizard of Oz and residencies
- The US Copyright Office hikes registration fees 43%, pricing out indie artists
- Udio admits scraping YouTube audio to train its AI music model
New Film Lending Platform
We recently launched a platform for investing in film bridge loans:film.alts.co
Want to invest in film bridge loans?
These are serious institutional-grade opportunities. Demand is high, and you need to qualify before investing.
1) Step 1: Take our course and pass the quiz. 2) Step 2: Fill out a short Qualification Form. 3) Step 3: We’ll confirm your accreditation status and send you an NDA to sign.
Crypto
- BlackRock readies two tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum
- Grayscale files for the first spot ETF tied to a privacy coin, targeting Zcash
- Coinbase backs Egyptian startup Kemet to bring institutional crypto derivatives to Africa
- Nigeria’s Paga taps Sui to launch stablecoin USD accounts and tokenized RWAs
Collectibles, Culture and Luxury
- An 1879 Coiled Hair Stella gold coin sells for $2.1 million, one of fourteen known
- Quincy Jones’s Patek Philippe heads to Christie’s Geneva at $1.8 million high estimate
- Italy’s Credem Bank keeps a “cheese cathedral” of Parmesan wheels as loan collateral, an unbroken record since 1953
- The US Mint debuts a Steve Jobs $1 coin in its American Innovation series
Private Equity & Private Credit
- Anthropic forms a $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman, Apollo, Sequoia, and GIC to embed engineers in PE portcos
- Apollo’s Torsten Slok says credit defaults are falling and no full credit cycle is in sight
- BlackRock, Blue Owl, and Blackstone all cut software exposure in private credit funds as AI bites
- The VC secondary market hits an annualized $112 billion, yet 81% of value sits in just 20 names
- Carlyle structures an $8.5 billion credit package to seed its next flagship buyout fund and pay old LPs
- ILPA brands continuation vehicles “conflict vehicles” as LP pushback intensifies
- iCapital now controls roughly 80% of the RIA alts marketplace
Anthropic’s $1.5B Joint Venture with Blackstone, Goldman, Apollo, Sequoia and GIC
This is the week’s most underrated story.
The largest alternative asset managers on earth are no longer just buying AI exposure, they’re building a captive consulting arm to deploy Claude engineers inside their portfolio companies.
It quietly turns AI into a PE operating-value lever and signals that the next phase of value creation in private markets will be AI-driven workflow redesign, not financial engineering.
Real Estate
- Dubai hotel occupancy is projected to fall to 10% in Q2 from 80% pre-war, as Brookfield and Alshaya launch a 480,000 square foot Dubai project, betting against Iran war risk-off
- The Duke of Westminster offloads £700 million of US real estate, pivoting to indirect exposure
- Detroit’s Ford Building, once the city’s tallest, opens at $2.5 million, down from $16 million in 2017
- Industrial leasing surges 28% year over year on AI driven data-center demand
- Blackstone files a $1.75 billion data-center REIT IPO, with Brookfield’s CSquare and DayOne also eyeing listings
- Providence bans self-storage, grouping it with prisons and slaughterhouses
The Franco policy still shaping Spanish real estate
You may have seen we have a new SPV investing in Valencia, Spain.
Our co-founder Wyatt lives down the road in Jávea and had a great issue breaking down why Spanish property is so weird — and why that’s actually the investment thesis.
Spain’s real estate market traces back not to market forces but to a war that ended 87 years ago. Franco’s regime built Spain around homeownership as ideology — subsidizing developers who sold rather than rented, writing mortgages for working-class buyers, and ultimately producing a country where 74% of people own their home and public housing accounts for less than 2% of total stock.
That policy created four persistent anomalies: an abnormally high homeownership rate, coastal premiums concentrated along the regions that resisted Franco hardest (Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics), Benidorm’s famous forest of high-rises (the result of a mayor who rode a Vespa to Madrid to get Franco’s permission for bikinis), and one of Europe’s worst squatter problems — a direct consequence of never building a functional rental sector in the first place.
Build-to-Rent is gaining traction in Spain precisely because the rental infrastructure that should exist never was. Less than 2% public housing, minimal institutional landlords, and surging demand have created a structural gap widening since 2008.
That’s the macro tailwind behind our BTR project in La Malva-rosa — and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Artwork 🖼️
- NYC Spring Art Week opens with Sotheby’s “The Now”, Frieze, and TEFAF testing market depth
- The S.I. Newhouse collection heads to Christie’s at a $1 billion estimate, potentially the largest single-owner sale ever
- Akira Ikezoe lands in both the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1, only the second artist to do so
- The Venice Biennale jury resigns en masse as the EU pulls €2 million in funding
Farmland
- Fresh tomato prices jump 40% year over year on Florida freezes and Mexico tariffs
- Whey protein concentrate prices are up over 50% since January as the protein boom hits supply walls
See you next time, Stefan
Disclosures
- This issue was sponsored by Bonum Consilium.
- This issue contains no affiliate links.
