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VC deep dive: Our latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor provides thorough data and analysis on the venture ecosystem, featuring insights on liquidity and how AI is driving the market. Read it here.
PE resurgence: US PE roared back to life in 2025, pulling off a trillion-dollar comeback. Our annual US PE Breakdown explores how.
Private market returns: Our Private Capital Indexes track returns across active, closed-end funds, drawing on data representing more than $4 trillion in net asset value. View the report
The latest on evergreen funds: For those seeking access to private markets through evergreen funds, there are some questions and considerations that should be explored before diving in. Our analyst note serves as a guide for due diligence in the space. Read it here. |
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| Citizens M&A Outlook—400 dealmakers share their expectations for 2026 M&A |
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The strength of the M&A market is rated at a six-year high in Citizens' 2026 survey of 400 U.S. companies and PE firms that invest in companies with revenue between $50 million and $1 billion.
- 58% of respondents assess the M&A market as somewhat or extremely strong.
- Companies open to selling rose to 79%, while those open to buying increased to 61%.
Find out why the U.S. market looks poised to build on 2025 trends, with conditions that could drive merger and acquisition activity beyond recent megadeals and into broader segments.
Gain insights into the trends, economic improvements, market conditions, and buyer/seller dynamics that are fueling deal activity, driving optimism, and creating a shift in the M&A dealmaking landscape.
Read the report |
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| The dawning of a new era in healthcare |
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The 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference reflected a sector emerging cautiously from a year of policy-driven volatility.
The prevailing tone was understated optimism: While uncertainty from 2025 has not fully dissipated, investors and operators alike signaled growing confidence that healthcare is entering a period of structural improvement driven by AI-enabled innovation, regulatory modernization and renewed balance sheet strength across providers.
Artificial intelligence was the defining theme of the conference, with the narrative clearly shifting from experimentation to execution.
In biopharma, AI-driven drug discovery has moved beyond decision support toward end-to-end systems capable of continuously generating and refining candidates. High-profile announcements, such as Lilly and Nvidia’s $1 billion co-innovation lab, validated AI as core infrastructure rather than optional tooling. At the same time, smaller AI-native biotechs focused investor attention on proprietary data generation, biological foundation models and early clinical traction.
Healthcare services AI showed equally tangible progress. Ambient scribing and AI-powered clinical and administrative agents drew standing-room-only audiences, underscoring their real-world ROI and accelerating adoption across health systems. Platforms like ModMed and Abridge exemplified a broader shift toward AI as an embedded operating layer rather than a point solution—reshaping workflows, revenue cycle management and clinician productivity. Unlike other sectors, healthcare showed little evidence of speculative excess, with AI deployments tied directly to measurable operational gains.
M&A momentum was anchored by MedTech, highlighted by Boston Scientific’s $14.5 billion acquisition of Penumbra. This was the largest healthcare deal announced at the conference and a signal that strategic buyers remain willing to pursue transformative transactions.
While overall deal volume remains muted, normalized valuations and strategic urgency around scale, cardiovascular exposure and AI capabilities point to a more active 2026. In contrast, biopharma dealmaking was quieter, though this likely reflects both timing and a shift towards forming durable independent companies rather than a deterioration in fundamentals.
Policy and government engagement also took on a more constructive tone. CMS leadership used JPM as an outreach forum, emphasizing quality, access, interoperability and administrative simplification. ARPA-H emerged as a particularly notable force, positioning itself as a DARPA-like catalyst capable of funding high-risk innovation while helping navigate regulatory barriers, which is an increasingly attractive dynamic for venture-backed and strategic players.
Elsewhere, GLP-1 competition shifted decisively toward commercialization and manufacturing execution, women’s health gained credibility as an investable category and hospital systems reported a return to healthier margins and cash balances. Notably absent, for the second straight year, were the major health insurers, raising questions about payer engagement as the healthcare ecosystem rapidly evolves.
Overall, JPM 2026 suggested a sector past peak uncertainty and approaching a new investment cycle that is defined less by narrative and more by delivery. For more detailed takeaways from the conference, read our full report. |
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| Defense tech's new constraint: the factory, not the funding |
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Manufacturing capacity has become the binding constraint in defense innovation, eclipsing both capital and technical novelty, our new report finds.
The primary failure mode for venture-backed defense startups is shifting from early-stage fundraising to what we call the "Valley of Production," where throughput, labor availability, compliance and supply chain resilience determine whether systems can actually be fielded at scale on compressed timelines.
Venture investors have responded by moving decisively upstream into financing physical production infrastructure. Manufacturing-focused defense investment rose from roughly $500 million annually in 2022-2023 to $2.6 billion across 24 deals in 2024, then surged again to $4.7 billion across 39 deals in 2025.
That step-change is less a cyclical spike than a structural repricing of execution risk, as investors increasingly underwrite factories, tooling, test infrastructure and supplier control as core drivers of enterprise value.
Capital is also concentrating in the hardware-intensive bottlenecks that define modern procurement priorities.
Drones ($2.1 billion), space systems and infrastructure ($1.6 billion), and defense electronics and sensing ($1.2 billion) captured much of the manufacturing scale-up capital from 2022 to 2025, reflecting the market’s recognition that scaling these categories is constrained more by facilities and compliant inputs than by software iteration speed. In propulsion, energetics, and maritime autonomy, the value of industrial control is rising because permitting timelines, test infrastructure scarcity, and supplier concentration remain inelastic.
This manufacturing pivot is now visible in company financing behavior. Median time between funding rounds compressed from around 21 months in 2022-2023 to about 13 months in 2024-2025, as startups pull capital forward to stand up production lines earlier and reduce downstream ramp risk. As the report puts it: Manufacturing readiness is becoming a first-order input to valuation and follow-on financing, not a post-contract operational detail.
For defense customers, the same filter is tightening. The Department of Defense shift toward attritable mass, or more affordable systems, is resetting procurement around delivery credibility, making manufacturing readiness levels increasingly decisive relative to technology readiness levels in contract progression.
Heading into 2026, the implication for investors is straightforward: Execution, not invention, will determine returns, and companies that convert facilities into repeatable output will disproportionately capture both capital and contract velocity.
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Clash of the Titans: Incumbents versus challengers in the age of agentic AI
Enterprise SaaS is experiencing a once-in-a-generation reset. As large language models mature and roll into every major suite, the market is bifurcating fast: Incumbents are bolting on copilots and task agents (AI-embedded platforms), while challengers are rebuilding end-to-end processes around autonomous agents (AI-native platforms).
That architecture choice is the core determinant of who compounds durable value versus who gets stuck with legacy drag. In plain terms: AI-embedded software boosts productivity inside familiar systems; AI-native software rewires workflows, flips pricing from seats to outcomes, and is where the real disruption (and margin expansion) lives.
The capital is following that thesis.
Even excluding LLM mega-rounds, enterprise SaaS deal activity has been steadily climbing since early 2024, with AI-related VC representing 64.3% of total global VC deal value in 2025 through Q3. |
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Growth-stage checks are concentrating around emergent category leaders such as Adept, Runway, Glean, Ramp, and Cresta, and exits are reaccelerating as incumbents buy capability and control-plane moats.
We estimate the AI workflow total addressable market was worth around $65 billion in 2025 and will scale to about $190 billion by 2030, driven by vertical agentic AI and AI-native productivity.
Read the report |
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Allocator Solutions: Does VC Improve Portfolio Outcomes or Complicate Them?
Venture capital is often viewed as a powerful tool for allocators to boost returns and diversify portfolios—but how does it actually perform once risk, volatility and liquidity are fully accounted for?
Our analysis shows that while VC has delivered strong performance in select cycles, aggregate returns have been middle of the pack within private markets and driven in large part by broader market dynamics.
After adjusting for valuation smoothing, VC also exhibits the highest estimated volatility across public and private asset classes, alongside structurally slower distributions |
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Our portfolio simulation framework suggests that, on average, portfolios with VC allocations have underperformed ones that allocated to public growth equities instead.
But averages can be misleading and manager selection is a critical factor in whether venture enhances or detracts from total portfolio performance.
Read the report |
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