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| The Daily Pitch |
| PE, VC and M&A |
| Your edge on global private capital markets |
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| Good morning. In today's Daily Pitch, we look at another startup taking on Nvidia's AI chips dominance, Germany's ups and downs of 2025 and data for public comps in fintech. |
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| Our new weekly newsletter, Public Meets Private, covers the intersection of alternatives and the wealth channel. Sign up here |
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| CVC Capital to acquire US credit manager Marathon for up to $1.2B |
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By Madeline Shi, Senior Private Equity Reporter
CVC Capital Partners, the Amsterdam-listed PE giant, agreed to buy US credit firm Marathon Asset Management for up to $1.2 billion as it seeks to expand its footprint in the fast-growing US credit market.
The deal marks the second high-profile general partner consolidation within a week, following EQT's deal to acquire secondaries pioneer Coller Capital for $3.2 billion, announced Thursday.
The transaction will be funded by $400 million in cash and up to $800 million in CVC shares. The deal also includes an additional earn-out of up to $400 million, which could push the overall price tag to $1.6 billion.
It comes at a time when capital is increasingly concentrated in a handful of managers at the top end of the market—a phenomenon that has become more entrenched not only in private credit, but also across other private market asset classes.
Global private credit funds raised $226.5 billion in 2025, with 38% of the capital flowing to vehicles larger than $5 billion, according to PitchBook data. |
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Blackstone, which acquired a minority stake in Marathon in 2016 through its GP stakes strategy, will receive $280 million in cash for all of its shares in the credit investment firm, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
Blackstone and CVC declined to comment, while Marathon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
CVC said the addition of Marathon, a New York-based $24 billion credit manager, is expected to increase its fee-generating credit assets to about €61 billion ($72.4 billion) by helping it expand into asset-based lending, real estate, opportunistic credit and public debt.
CVC aims to reach €200 billion in fee-paying AUM by 2028, a metric highly prized by public equity analysts for its stability. The firm had €142 billion in fee-paying AUM as of September across private equity, credit, infrastructure and secondaries.
PitchBook affiliate Morningstar noted in July that CVC's greater reliance on carried interest, rather than contractually guaranteed management fees, represents a risk relative to peers. |
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| A message from West Monroe |
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| 2026 Software Industry Outlook |
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The software industry is being rewired in real time. Competitive advantage is shifting faster than at any point since the dawn of SaaS as AI reshapes how companies build, sell, and deliver technology. This transformation will rival the SaaS and cloud revolutions of the early 2000s—but at an exponentially faster pace.
The leaders of 2026 won’t simply bolt AI onto products. They’ll use it to accelerate innovation, connect products and services, and deliver differentiated experiences. They’ll know where their value comes from and double down—using AI to speed up development, strengthen operations, and scale what works. The best will balance serving today’s customers while reinventing for what’s next.
See the key trends shaping the software industry in 2026. |
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• The latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor is chock-full of insights into how AI is driving the market—accounting for over 65% of total funding in 2025, or $222 billion. Read it now
• Just out: Our Q4 valuations data for public companies in the fintech and payments sector. Preview the report
• Germany's private markets ended 2025 with selective momentum, as the country hit a record for unicorn count but PE funding slowed in Q4. Read the report |
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| Ricursive raises $300M as funding for Nvidia challengers nearly doubles |
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By Jacob Robbins, Technology Reporter
Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier research lab focused on AI chip design, has raised a $300 million Series A at a $4 billion valuation.
The mega-deal highlights a rush of investor enthusiasm for specialized chips as the AI boom has begun to mature beyond the initial development of large language models. Funding for the category nearly doubled in 2025 as more startups take on Nvidia's dominance.
Lightspeed led this round, with participating investors including Sequoia, Radical AI and Nvidia's venture investing arm, NVentures.
Ricursive was founded by two former Google researchers with the goal of using AI to design the specialized chips that power large language models. The startup raised $35 million in seed funding in December.
Nvidia has largely cornered the market on AI chips, with its GPUs becoming highly coveted for their performance in handling the complex demands of AI computing.
There's a new wave of startups focused on designing chips for inference—that is, processing a query of an AI model. GPUs, like those made by Nvidia, are used for training AI models because of their ability to repeatedly brute-force the same task. Using traditional GPUs for inference can often be slower and more costly, as inference requires fewer, but more efficient, resources.
But Nvidia isn't sitting on the sidelines. Beyond investing in Ricursive, it entered into a $20 billion agreement in December with Groq, an inference chipmaker, to license the startup's tech and bring on key talent.
Other AI chip startups are trying to capitalize on the booming interest in inference and other specializations, with AI and machine learning semiconductor companies nearly doubling their VC funding in 2025. |
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Funding jumped from $4.8 billion in 2024 to $8.4 billion in 2025, a 75% increase, according to PitchBook data. Deal count remains muted, declining from 214 deals in 2024 to 174 in 2025, a 17% decline as investors focus on a smaller cohort of breakout companies.
But the startups that are raising new capital are raking in huge sums.
In early January, Etched, an AI inference chip startup, raised $500 million from Stripes and Peter Thiel, Bloomberg reported. In December, Mythic, another AI inference chip startup focusing on edge devices, raised $125 million from DCVC. |
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Smart reads that caught our eye.
• The price of gold reached a record high Monday, surging above $5,000 an ounce, as investors sought a safe haven amid rising global risks. [The New York Times]
• Waymo, already the country's most extensive robotaxi operation, is pushing hard for a bite of the Big Apple. [Politico]
• Jeremy Coller’s sale of his firm with $50 billion in AUM to EQT marks the zenith of a career that has defied norms and an underwhelming early resume. [ | | | | | | | |
