Private Markets Sector

James Watt, co-founder of the collapsed Scottish craft brewer Brewdog, is facing complaints to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office after reportedly contacting former shareholders without clear authorization as part of a bid to buy back the company through his new firm, Second Best. Brewdog collapsed with over £500m in debt earlier this year and was acquired by US drinks firm Tilray for about £33m, wiping out roughly 200,000 crowdfunding investors' equity. The data privacy breach allegation centers on how Watt obtained contact details for the so-called "Equity for Punk" investors, raising concerns about violations of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation—Europe's strict data privacy law).

Citizens Bank announced it will exit lending relationships with CoreCivic and The GEO Group, two major private prison operators that manage immigration detention facilities under the Trump administration, citing "changed commercial circumstances" rather than political pressure. The move follows intense public campaigns and threats from city governments in New Jersey to withdraw deposits if the bank didn't cut ties. The bank framed the decision as purely commercial—the federal government has said it plans to buy several facilities currently run by these companies, reducing their financial needs—but the action highlights the growing political minefield around "debanking" (when banks terminate relationships with clients or industries) under heightened regulatory scrutiny.

Data analytics startup Databricks announced a new funding round valuing the company at $188 billion—up from $134 billion just five months ago—as it successfully repositioned itself from a big-data software vendor into an AI powerhouse serving enterprise customers. The company raised roughly $3 billion from lead investor Coatue, continuing a remarkable fundraising tear that has included five major rounds in less than two years and spawned memes about running out of alphabet letters for series designations. Databricks' image transformation is legit: it now offers AI products like Lakebase (a database for AI agents) and Unity (an AI gateway), and notably published research showing that cheaper open-weight models (Chinese code like Z.ai's GLM 5.2) can handle complex coding tasks at a fraction of the cost of proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic.