Happy Thursday. The office market is recovering, Mistral raised the biggest VC round in European history, housing inventory hit a 6 year-high, and Stoke Space tripled its valuation. Let's dive in!
🎫 Register: For our next investor briefing focusing on the future of defense tech, looking at companies like Hadrian, Castelion, and Neros.
This issue is brought to you by The Champion Fund - structured access to the sports economy.
📈 DAILY MARKETS
🏢 OFFICE RECOVERY
The office market is continuing its recovery, as sales are up 31% year-over-year, with sales in downtown urban areas rising 46%. The office sector is also the only one in commercial real estate that showed year-over-year pricing gains, with a 4% uptick. One reason for growing buying demand is the increase in office occupancy nationwide, with peak days in Class-A office space reaching more than 90% of the attendance from pre-pandemic times.
➨ TAKEAWAY: The rebound of the office sector is accelerating, particularly for Class-A properties in major metro areas, as tenant demand remains highest for the top-quality buildings. Despite the increase in sales volume and prices, office still remains the lowest-rated sector according to CRE Daily’s Fear & Greed Index, and sentiment is actually down year-over-year. This disconnect between perception and performance could mean that there are still opportunities for investors in the space.
Partner
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📺 UPCOMING EVENT
Join Vincent’s Slava Rubin and Sacra’s Marcelo Ballve for a closer look at the private companies driving the next generation of defense technology. We’ll explore startups across AI, autonomous systems, drones, advanced aerospace, and next-generation hardware, examining where innovation is accelerating, which companies are gaining traction, and what investors should watch as defense spending and strategic competition reshape the market.
Thursday September 17 at 11 AM ET
📰 NOTABLE NEWS
🤖 Mistral doubles valuation: The French AI startup raised $3.5 billion at a valuation of $24 billion, nearly double its valuation from a year ago. The raise is the biggest VC funding round in European history, and puts Mistral as the second-most valuable startup on the continent.
🏡 Supply hits 6-year high: The number of U.S. homes for sale rose to its highest level since 2020, as new listings hit their highest level in more than four years. However, pending home sales were flat as buying demand remains low thanks to elevated mortgage rates and affordability concerns.
🚀 Stoke Space fundraise: The rocket developer raised a $1 billion round at a reported $10 billion valuation, nearly triple its valuation from February. It is planning to have its debut launch next year and plans to directly compete with SpaceX in the reusable rocket market.
🪙 South Korea tokenization: South Korea's top financial regulator announced plans to tokenize money market funds, corporate bonds, and equities starting in February. This development will eventually allow institutional and retail investors to trade these assets with stablecoins.
💵 BCRED again caps withdrawals: For the second consecutive quarter, Blackstone has capped quarterly redemptions on its flagship private credit fund to 5%, despite withdrawal requests hitting more than 10% of total shares.
👛 $1.9 million rare coin: A $4 dollar gold coin from 1879 sold for nearly $2 million at Heritage auctions, nearly double the $1.04 million it sold for in 2013. Only 14 known examples of the “Coiled Hair Liberty” coin exist, and a different one sold for more than $2 million in April.
🤖 AI CORNER
Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher at Anthropic who previously worked for OpenAI, quit his job in dramatic fashion, posting on X that the companies are “gambling with our lives.” The post went viral and has been viewed more than 70 million times, but the most notable response came from a former co-worker at Anthropic, who said that the company does believe that superintelligent AI could kill all humans. Not so reassuringly, he put the odds at less than 10% within the next decade, which begs the question of why we are developing a technology than has any odds of leading to extinction. Many are now asking that question, and Congress is starting to introduce bills to regulate advanced AI models. While all of this presents an existential risk, it also presents a risk to the companies and the economy that has been propped up by AI over the past couple of years.
