Private Markets Investing

How can insurance play a transformative role in the face of climate change? As sovereign debt sustainability is a growing concern, mobilizing private-sector financing for climate mitigation and adaptation projects is crucial. Swiss Re's report ‘Changing climates: The heat is (still) on' estimated a cumulative global investment gap of over USD 270 trillion to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. There is immense potential to channel more private capital into adaptation and mitigation finance. For example, the report states, the sustainable debt market is still underdeveloped, with a total of USD 5.6 trillion (less than 5% of global bond markets), and only around 5% of new global debt issuance is ESG-labelled. Shockingly, less than 2% of adaptation finance currently comes from private sources. The insurance industry can play a pivotal role in changing that. As long-term investors, insurers can finance mitigation efforts and adaptation infrastructure. They can also underwrite climate-positive projects, share risk knowledge, and help to de-risk projects to crowd in capital. Please read the full report and its findings below. What do you see as the biggest blockers to adaptation and mitigation finance? How do they differ by sector and region? #SustainableFinance #ClimateChange #NetZero #Insurance #PrivateSector #Investment #ClimateAdaptation #Mitigation #ESG

The Rise of African Family Offices! “Africa doesn’t need more venture capital — it needs more patient family capital.” For too long, Africa’s investment narrative has been dominated by venture capital — chasing quick exits, high returns, and fast growth. But Africa’s greatest opportunities aren’t found in short-term plays. They’re built through patient, purpose-driven capital that stays long enough to shape industries, empower entrepreneurs, and create generational impact. 💼 VC vs Family-Office Capital Venture Capital: ⚡ Short-term, exit-driven, milestone obsessed. 💸 External LPs, 5-10 year horizons, rapid scaling. Family Offices: 🌍 Long-term, values-driven, intergenerational. 🏗 Built for stewardship, legacy, and real-world impact. In Africa, this shift matters — because building industries like energy, agriculture, healthcare, education, and infrastructure takes decades, not funding rounds. 🧭 Fio Capital’s Approach At Fio Capital, we’ve adopted a buy-and-hold philosophy. We invest patient family capital into core impact industries — creating jobs, driving inclusion, and building sustainable African enterprises. We don’t just invest in Africa. We invest with Africa — alongside founders and families who share a vision of conscious, generational wealth creation. 🌱 From Wealth Preservation to Impact Creation A mature family office isn’t just about protecting assets — it’s about preserving purpose. Wealth without wisdom fades. Stewardship ensures legacy. Africa’s next generation of family offices is redefining success — not in terms of ROI alone, but in return on impact, return on integrity, and return on community. 🏆 5 African Family Offices to Watch 1️⃣ Heirs Holdings (Nigeria) — Tony Elumelu’s family office driving investments in power, finance, and healthcare. 2️⃣ Tengen Family Office (Nigeria) — founded by Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede & Herbert Wigwe, focused on long-term value creation. 3️⃣ Oppenheimer Generations (South Africa) — Nicky & Jonathan Oppenheimer’s vehicle, investing in sustainability and African industry. 4️⃣ Dangote Family Office (Nigeria) — Aliko Dangote’s global expansion vehicle for African industrial growth. 5️⃣ Mary Oppenheimer Daughters (South Africa / UK) — diversified investments across private equity and real assets. Do you believe family offices should take a more active role in building Africa’s industries — beyond just preserving wealth? 👉 Comment your view below — or tag a family-office leader shaping the continent’s next chapter.

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲’𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥&𝗗: 𝗠𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗱 ‼️ Last week the International Monetary Fund published a very interesting and comprehensive paper about the need for more venture capital in Europe to tackle our continents challenges. To name a few: ✔️productivity per hour worked is app 30% lower in 🇪🇺compared to the 🇺🇸 ✔️R&D investments are still way below the target of 3% per annum ✔️Within the top 100 tech companies worldwide merely a handful are European Is it all about 💶 I here you say? No it is about keeping up our welfare for future generations. And about a liveable planet. And increasing our innovation and competitiveness are crucial to do so. Which is also the key message of Mr. Draghi’s report I hope. The IMF report takes a deeper dive into the underlying issues: ✔️ VC investments are only 0,4% of GDP. In the US it is 3x as much ✔️Europeans park their savings in bank accounts. And banks are very risk aversie when it comes to financing hightech startups. ✔️Long term savings go primarily via pension funds, who hardly invest in VC in Europe (despite some positive signs recently) ✔️The EU has fewer and smaller VC funds leading to smaller rounds, less opportunities for scale-up financing and limited exit options ✔️ European scale-ups end up listing in the US instead of Europe itself ✔️ National fragmentation within the EU leads to a lot of barriers for scaling What has to be done? ✅ Increase efforts on a real single European market, for example by consolidating stock market exchanges and diminishing cross border red tape ✅ Make it more attractive for pension funds and insurers to step into VC ✅ Enhance the capacity of European Investment Bank (EIB), European Investment Fund (EIF) and national promotional institutes, like Invest-NL ✅ Implement preferential tax treatments for equity investments in startups and VC funds ✅ Encourage more funds-of-funds And I would like to ad to the findings in the report two things: 1️⃣ We need a cultural mind shift, more urgency and embracing true entrepreneurship 2️⃣ We have to step up our game when it comes to tech transfer. Transforming our high quality academic knowledge into economic and societal impact via startups.

Survey Says Insurance companies collectively hold over $40 trillion in assets worldwide, including more than $10 trillion in the United States. Given their long-term liabilities, insurers primarily invest in fixed-income securities to align assets and liabilities. However, unlike banks, they enjoy greater flexibility to allocate capital to alternative assets. A recent survey by the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, highlights the insurance industry’s growing intention to expand allocations to private markets and alternative investments—reinforcing the strategic value of building robust internal alternative investment capabilities. Notably, private credit stands out as a clear area of focus, with strong industry momentum toward private credit strategies. Every insurance companies has its own considerations, yet generating a strong, steady, absolute return throughout the cycle has become a differentiating factor. 5%, 10%, or 20% allocation to alternatives is a meaningful number within a $40T sector.

𝟭 𝗶𝗻 𝟰 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻’𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱. 𝟭 𝗶𝗻 𝟭𝟬 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻. Together with Laura Koch and Elisabeth Berger (JKU - Institute for Entrepreneurship), I surveyed 361 international VCs using a randomized response technique to bypass social desirability bias. The results aren't unconscious bias. The results are open discrimination. And it’s personal. Some of the strongest startups I’ve seen at the University of Hohenheim were women-led, such as Holiroots or Viva la Faba. What a waste of potential. We knew gender bias existed in venture capital. Now we know how much — and where. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘄? One recommendation from our findings that’s both practical and powerful: 👉 Increase the share of women in venture capital. Why it matters:  • Women VCs show significantly less bias.  • Diverse teams make better decisions.  • Mixed teams perform better. If we want fairer funding decisions, we must rethink who’s making them. 𝗟𝗲𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝗶𝗳 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲 “𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲.” 𝗟𝗲𝘁’𝘀 𝗮𝘀𝗸 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻’𝘁. The paper is open access in Venture Capital—An International Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance. Feel free to share it or use it in teaching, workshops, or policy work. 📄 https://lnkd.in/eN4jfJQx

For the first time in venture history, three distinct channels share the liquidity burden roughly equally. A decade ago, secondaries barely registered. They accounted for roughly 3% of exit value in 2015. Today they claim 31% : nearly $95b in the trailing twelve months. The shift accelerated after 2021’s IPO bonanza. When public markets closed their doors in 2022, investors found alternative routes. Secondaries absorbed demand that would have flowed to traditional exits. When Goldman Sachs acquired Industry Ventures, the transaction signaled secondaries have arrived. Morgan Stanley followed with EquityZen, then Charles Schwab announced its acquisition of Forge Global. Wall Street recognized the structural change before most of venture did. This matters for founders & investors. When IPOs dominated exits, fund models assumed a small number of public offerings would generate the bulk of returns. Now liquidity arrives through multiple doors. A founder might sell secondary shares to patient capital while the company remains private. A GP might move positions through continuation vehicles. An LP might trade fund stakes on an increasingly liquid secondary market. The 830 unicorns holding $3.9t in aggregate post-money valuation cannot all exit through IPOs. The math doesn’t work. At 2025’s pace of 48 VC-backed IPOs, clearing the unicorn backlog would take seventeen years. Secondaries provide a release valve that traditional exits cannot. Companies like OpenAI have embraced this reality, running employee tender offers while voiding unauthorized secondary transfers. The largest private companies now manage their own liquidity programs rather than waiting for public markets. Today, secondary liquidity concentrates in the top 20 names. SpaceX, Stripe, OpenAI. For the founder of company #50, the secondary market remains largely theoretical. For secondaries to succeed as a broad asset class, buyers must underwrite positions in companies without household recognition. As the market grows, this coverage gap becomes opportunity. For LPs starved of distributions since 2022, the expansion of secondary channels offers hope. The $169b in cumulative negative net cash flows needs somewhere to go. More exit paths mean more opportunities to return capital. When a Series B employee asks about liquidity today, the answer isn’t “wait for the IPO.” It’s “we’re planning a tender offer next year.” A decade ago, secondaries were a footnote. Now they’re infrastructure. Liquidity flows where it can, not where tradition suggests it should.

Exactly 1 year after the Draghi report, ASML commits 1,7 billion EUR to Mistral.ai, becoming its largest shareholder. Has Europe finally waken up? The alliance between the continent's two AI champions - the world leader in chip-making machines and the rising LLM star - is great news: a European corporate finally investing massively in a European scaleup from its industry, even if not directly tied to its core business. This follows other positive developments, like the partnership between automaker Renault and exoskeleton scaleup Wandercraft to lighten the workload of workers who handle heavy loads in factories. But this kind of news are still the exception and not the rule: to mainstream this virtuous deals, we need Europe to enact an industrial policy for tech and innovation. This starts with recognising that tech is not only a fully-fledged economic sector, but also a strategic one to be treated with the same consideration of energy, chemicals or steel. A sector, for which the EU should have a truly shared competence to coordinate in practice - and not just in words - the work of Member States. Once we get there, we need to put in place a 5 step action plan: 1️⃣ Introducing a European preference in public procurement to organically support the growth of our startups, scaleups and tech companies. This should not be a blank obligation, but an additional evaluation criteria which weight will depend on the sensitivity of the concerned use case. 2️⃣ Creating real incentives for massive European private capital (savings and corporate investment) to finance innovation. European pension and insurance funds already invest in US innovative companies. Why not do the same in Europe? As for corporates, we need more of them to follow the example of ASML and Renault and look beyond their immediate business for their strategic investments. 3️⃣ Put in place a “28th regime” making it seamless for European companies to expand and operate in the Single Market as their domestic market. 4️⃣ A structural reform of the European budget for innovation (starting with the Competitiveness Fund) to allocate funding based on the innovative potential of projects rather than their geographical distribution. 5️⃣ A competition and merger control framework that promotes the consolidation and emergence of European tech champions. If we manage to do this, we will create jobs, unlock growth and secure our businesses against geopolitical risks. And with that, we will finally regain our leverage in international negotiations—whether in matters of trade or peace—with the world’s other great powers. More on these ideas in our latest report drafted with Marianne T. and Marie Moussy and nicely laid out by Séverine MERCIER --> link to the full publication in the comments (available in 🇬🇧 and 🇫🇷 ).

The next frontier: A Q&A on private credit’s growth, through an insurance lens As private credit continues to evolve into a sizable and scalable asset class, its addressable markets of investors and borrowers have also expanded. Among the most notable shifts, in our view, has been the increasing participation from the insurance investor base. In this Q&A, we address several of the most frequently asked questions related to the insurance industry’s participation in private credit. We also provide color on the trend of partnerships between asset managers and insurers, including the benefits provided to each party and the tactical execution behind such partnerships. #PrivateCredit #Insurance #InvestmentGrade For Institutional Investors Only, read the full report here: https://1blk.co/4oZju6V

Recently founded unicorns are staying private at an unprecedented scale. While the volume of unicorns has exploded, the exit pathways have narrowed. This has created a liquidity gap — a structural disconnect where value creation outstrips the market's ability to return cash to investors. To see the scale of this challenge, let us look at the data that my team and I have just analyzed on our comprehensive sample of US unicorns. Almost 800 unicorns founded in 2020-2025 are private a year after becoming a unicorn, compared to 332 founded in 2010-2019 that remained private at the same stage. By year three after becoming a unicorn, the number of still privately held unicorns (575) is nearly 3x higher than those founded in the previous decade (206) at the same three-year mark. The gap is even more pronounced if we compare with an earlier cohort. Only 11 unicorns founded in 1999-2009 remained private at the three-year mark — a tiny fraction of the 575 we see today. This shift is driven by a combination of factors: the increasing availability of private capital that allows companies to delay going public, a desire to avoid the scrutiny and perceived short-termism of public markets, a recent freeze in traditional exit routes like an IPO, and contractual terms when these companies raised money previously at higher post-money valuations. Taken together, this creates a challenge for capital recycling. As trillions in value remain locked in private portfolios, the engine that funds the next generation of innovation is coming under pressure. Many VC fund managers experience this first-hand today as they try raising their next funds. NOTE: Data only covers US unicorns. The chart displays the number of unicorns that remain private after a specific number of years since founding, broken down by founding years. Thank you to the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Venture Capital Initiative for support.

TreeHouse Foods goes private – when scale alone isn’t enough TreeHouse Foods, one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of private label food and beverages, is being acquired by European investment firm Investindustrial for $2.9 billion. The all-cash transaction, priced at $22.50 per share, is expected to close in Q1 2026, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. The deal also includes potential proceeds from ongoing litigation against Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.. Why it matters? TreeHouse’s sale illustrates a fundamental truth in the private label industry: strong category growth alone doesn’t guarantee success. Despite favorable consumer trends, TreeHouse failed to convert momentum into consistent performance. Recalls due to potential listeria, supply chain issues, and weaker shopper demand eroded both trust and profitability. In Q3 2025, sales grew just 0.1% year-on-year — from $839.1M to $840.3M — driven mainly by inflation-related pricing, not volume. For a company positioned at the heart of the value-driven food shift, this is a missed opportunity. Going private offers TreeHouse a reset — free from the quarterly scrutiny of public markets. For Investindustrial, which already acquired parts of TreeHouse in 2022, this move signals a long-term bet on the resilience of private label. Once completed, the firm will oversee 85 manufacturing sites and 16,000 employees across its food portfolio. Private label is forecast to represent over 20% of grocery sales in 2025 (GlobalData Plc) — nearly doubling from 12% two decades ago. This acquisition shows that leadership in this segment now demands more than scale: executional excellence, operational resilience, and strategic agility are key. #privatelabel #foodindustry #retailtrends #fmcg #mna #investindustrial #treehousefoods #retailstrategy #consumerbehavior #usretail #europeaninvestors #northamerica #marketdynamics #retailchallenges #storebrands #grocerysector #investmentstrategy #foodmanufacturing #foodrecall #supplychainissues #retailfinance #valueforconsumers #foodtech #retailinsight #omnichannel #retailtransformation #usmarket #europeaninvestment #retailnews #fmcgupdates #retailoperations #illinois #europe