Private Markets Sector

Jeff Bezos is putting his own money where his mouth is: Blue Origin is raising $10 billion at a $130 billion valuation, with Bezos himself chipping in $2 billion and hedge fund Coatue Management adding $4 billion (CNBC reports). This marks the rocket company's first outside funding round ever—a watershed moment for a secretive operation that Bezos has bankrolled solo since 2000. The timing is notable: it comes right after SpaceX's blockbuster $86 billion IPO in June, which valued Elon Musk's company at $2 trillion, and signals that major capital is treating space infrastructure as serious, long-term business.

SpaceX closed Wednesday at $148, below its $150 debut price—a jarring comedown from the $201.80 high it hit just days after launching on June 12 (CNBC reports). The culprit: automatic buying by index funds forced to add SpaceX when it joined the Nasdaq-100 benchmark, followed by profit-taking as those same funds rebalance. Analysts remain mostly bullish (Morgan Stanley at $300 target, Bernstein at $239), but the gap between hype and reality is already visible—a cautionary tale for private markets watching how their eventual public debuts may trade.

Lovable, a Swedish startup that lets you build software by describing what you want (think: asking a co-worker to code for you), is raising $300 million at a $13.2 billion valuation—exactly double what it was worth six months ago (TechCrunch reports via Sifted). The company hit $500 million in annualized revenue run rate in June and counts Workday, Asana, and Nvidia as customers. This is the hottest corner of AI venture capital right now: "vibe coding" startups like Replit ($9 billion) and Factory ($1.5 billion) are attracting massive capital because enterprises will actually pay for tools that let non-engineers build software.