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| The Daily Pitch |
| PE, VC and M&A |
| Your edge on global private capital markets |
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✈️ As US CEOs return from China, attention is back on the Middle East, where air cargo capacity has plunged 50% due to the war. The air freight market has shifted, with high jet fuel costs and closed airspace causing a significant disturbance. Read more in our Q1 2026 Logistics Report.
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| 3 charts to catch up on the OpenAI-Anthropic rivalry |
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By Jacob Robbins and Rosie Bradbury, PitchBook News
Anthropic has signed a term sheet for a deal that would give it an expected post-money valuation of $930 billion, the Financial Times reported, bringing its valuation above OpenAI's $852 billion for the first time. |
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It's the latest move in the ongoing race between the two AI frontier labs to IPO.
Stripping out debt facilities and secondary transactions, Anthropic would reach an expected post-money valuation of $930 billion on roughly $103 billion in equity, while OpenAI reached $852 billion on $173 billion. That's a 9.0x equity return ratio for Anthropic, compared to 4.9x for OpenAI.
"Investors are paying roughly 1.8 times more per equity dollar deployed into Anthropic, and that gap has been widening for two consecutive rounds," said Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook.
In the US, 34.4% of businesses have adopted Anthropic, while 32.3% have adopted OpenAI—the first crossover on record, according to corporate spending management company Ramp's May 2026 AI Index. A year ago, Anthropic was under 10%.
"Claude Code drove a lot of that, pulling enterprise developers into workflows that then expanded into department-wide contracts at 140%+ net retention," Rolfes said.
Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia and Altimeter Capital are reportedly leading the round, with each expected to commit at least $2 billion.
For Greenoaks and Altimeter, Anthropic is becoming a very significant bet. Each firm has about $18 billion in total assets under management, making their latest investment in the AI lab just over 10% of their current respective AUM.
Altimeter, Sequoia and Dragoneer have all also invested in OpenAI as well.
"Whoever goes public first at the higher multiple anchors how the entire frontier AI category gets priced. Anthropic has the cleaner path right now: no corporate restructuring overhang, no single-customer concentration near OpenAI's roughly 35% Microsoft dependency, and gross margins reportedly above 70%, up from 38% a year ago," Rolfes said. "That's a margin trajectory public investors can actually underwrite." |
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| Organizations are rapidly adopting GenAI, transforming the M&A process. |
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• Mega-seed rounds topping $1 billion are flooding AI startups with cash, but early-stage VCs warn the trend breeds distraction over discipline—constraint builds great companies, not capital alone. Read more
• Fresh data shows that private credit vehicles stomped the brakes on new fundings in Q1 as software fears and heavy scrutiny weighed on the market. See why |
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| Fewer deals, bigger bets as Europe leads VC funding for climate tech |
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By Leah Hodgson, Deputy Editor, European Private Markets
Europe has pulled ahead of every other region for climate-tech VC funding for the first time, but capital is increasingly concentrated in a handful of deals.
In the first three months of the year, European VCs invested $6.6 billion in the vertical, according to PitchBook's Q1 2026 Climate Tech VC Trends report. Deal value is 20% higher than in North America, which typically leads globally, and more than triple Asia's Q1 total. |
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Based on Q1 data, deal value is on track for a record year, but most capital is flowing to a very small number of startups.
Europe claimed the three largest climate-tech VC deals last quarter, and the only ones to surpass $1 billion. UK-based Low Carbon Materials, which develops carbon-negative additives that decarbonize concrete and asphalt, raised $1.5 billion in March. German renewable energy startup Cloover closed a $1.2 billion Series A in January, while Octopus Energy spin-off Kraken Technologies secured $1 billion in the same month.
Together, these deals represent 56.4% of Europe's Q1 deal value. The concentration in capital is reflected in deal count, which is tracking below last year's level with just 191 European rounds closing in Q1.
While dealmaking has slowed, there are meaningful tailwinds for climate-tech startups. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have reinforced the urgency of energy independence in Europe, accelerating political and corporate appetite for alternatives such as renewables.
AI offers opportunities for startups, particularly in the built environment segment. AI is being used to optimize energy management and grid infrastructure. The high energy demands of data centers are spawning a new global subset of companies focused on reducing their environmental impact.
But geopolitical instability cuts both ways. Disruption to global shipping routes and supply chains is affecting hardware-heavy verticals, including climate tech, adding costs and uncertainty for startups. |
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Smart reads that caught our eye.
• Meta employees are being asked to train the AI that will replace them. "Even if we haven't lost our jobs to AI yet, we're being commoditized in advance." [The San Francisco Standard]
• Larry Peter sees AI agents as a crucial part of keeping his cheese business alive. See how Petaluma Creamery embraced technology to improve the delivery of products from its 400 cows. [Fortune]
• Personalized health algorithms might be missing the mark, especially for those with chronic health conditions. [The Verge] |
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