Private Markets Sector

James Watt, who co-founded Brewdog before stepping back as CEO in 2024, is under scrutiny from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) — the regulator that enforces data privacy rules — after reportedly contacting former crowdfunding shareholders without a clear legal basis. Brewdog collapsed under £500m in debt before Tilray acquired the brand, IP, and 11 bars for just £33m, wiping out roughly 200,000 small investors who had bought in through the 'Equity for Punks' crowdfunding scheme. Watt's new vehicle, Second Best, claims 43,000 of those scorched investors are backing his buyback bid — but Tilray has flatly said the brand isn't for sale and has distanced itself entirely from Watt's data practices. For private markets, this is a reminder that crowdfunding rounds create messy cap tables (the list of who owns what) and messier data obligations that don't simply evaporate when a company goes into administration.

Citizens Bank announced it is winding down lending relationships with CoreCivic and The GEO Group — the two dominant private prison operators now heavily contracted by ICE to run immigration detention centers under the Trump administration — citing 'changed commercial circumstances' rather than political pressure. The bank's diplomatic framing has a real basis: the federal government is actively buying facilities from CoreCivic and negotiating with GEO, which genuinely reduces those companies' need for third-party bank financing. But the move comes after two New Jersey city councils threatened to pull municipal deposits from Citizens, illustrating how ESG pressure (investing based on environmental, social, and governance factors) and political pressure can converge into hard financial consequences for banks. Critically, Citizens flagged the regulatory tightrope: Trump-era bank regulators are actively investigating 'debanking' practices, meaning Citizens had to frame this exit as a business call — because being seen to debank for political reasons carries its own regulatory and reputational risk in the current climate.

Databricks has closed yet another funding round — its valuation now stands at $188 billion, up from $134 billion just five months ago and $62 billion in December 2024, making it one of the fastest-climbing private companies on record (TechCrunch). The enterprise data firm, founded in 2013, successfully repositioned itself as an AI infrastructure play by building products like Lakebase (a database designed for AI agents) and Unity (an AI management gateway), sitting on the enterprise data troves that corporations need to run AI securely. It has also become a champion of cost-cutting through open-weight models — AI models whose underlying code is publicly available — publishing research showing that Z.ai's GLM 5.2 rivals proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI for coding tasks at lower total cost. In private markets, where valuation is set by investor appetite rather than public trading, this kind of compounding re-rating is rare and signals just how much institutional capital is chasing AI infrastructure exposure ahead of any potential IPO.