Alternative Investing Report - September 24, 2025

*as of 9/23; Sources: S&P, BTC, FTSE, DJRE, CL50

Of the ten biggest funding rounds last week, four went to AI startups, with two more going to closely related robotics companies, continuing the sector’s dominance over venture funding. The AI chipmaker Groq raised $750 million at a $6.9 billion valuation, more than doubling its last valuation, while Lila Sciences, Invisible Technologies, and Upscale AI all raised rounds of $100 million or more.

➨ TAKEAWAY: This week has brought two more big fundraises - first, Distyl AI raised $175 million at a $1.8 billion valuation, nine times bigger than its $200 million valuation less than a year ago. Second, the agentic AI startup AppZen raised $180 million at an undisclosed valuation. With all this money flying around, there are concerns of an AI bubble, and that AI companies will not generate enough revenue to cover the exorbitant costs of running their data centers. Investors should be purposeful when determining which AI companies, if any, to target, and not just pick a company because it is AI-related.

Global private credit fundraising hit $113.2 billion in the first half of 2025 and is on track to slightly exceed last year’s total, though it has declined from its peak in 2021. However, the number of funds being closed continues to fall significantly, with 2025 on pace to come in with the fewest funds in more than a decade. With the private credit market growing, firms are looking to lend to larger public companies, which can offer higher returns for investors.

➨ TAKEAWAY: As with private equity and venture capital, investors are putting more capital into fewer funds, concentrating their bets on larger firms with longer track records - the median fund size has nearly doubled since 2022. These firms are also increasingly targeting wealthy individual investors, with many managers aiming to raise 25% of their capital from the retail channel.

🚜 New farmland REIT: Investment manager Nuveen launched a private farmland REIT open to accredited investors and is aiming to raise $3 billion in capital. Nuveen’s investment arm already manages $13 billion worth of farmland, making it one of the largest farmland investors in the world.

🪙 Morgan Stanley crypto trading: The Wall Street bank is preparing to offer its E-Trade clients the ability to trade crypto and tokenized assets in the first half of 2026, another sign of digital assets merging with the mainstream financial world.

🏡 Home prices edge up: U.S. home prices were up 0.2% in August and 3.1% year-over-year, the lowest annual growth rate since 2012, as buying demand remained low. The markets with the highest yearly price growth were New York City, Nassau County, NY, and Newark, NJ, a clean sweep for the New York metro area.

🚀 Electric truck fundraise: The startup Telo raised a $20 million Series A to build small electric trucks for use in cities and is planning to build 5,000 of its MT1 vehicless per year to start out.

🏢 Emerging industrial markets: Smaller cities such as Boise, Albuquerque, and El Paso are becoming industrial real estate centers as bigger cities are becoming less affordable.

🎨 Unseen Picasso up for auction: A 1943 painting by Picasso not seen in public in more than 80 years - Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (Dora Maar) - is coming up for auction in Paris in late October with an estimate of $9.4 million.

While the overall crypto market is down around 6% in the past five days, a token that didn’t exist a week ago has seen exponential price growth. The price of Aster, the native token of its namesake decentralized exchange on the Binance Smart Chain, has gone from $.08 at launch to above $2 in less than a week. Aster specializes in perpetual futures and has already emerged as a rival to Hyperliquid - itself less than a year old - which it already surpassed in daily revenue and is approaching in daily volume. Of course, any token that sees such rapid price growth is going to have a lot of volatility, so don’t be surprised to see the price come back down quickly. The value of an exchange’s native token is in large part a product of how popular the exchange is, and Aster’s quick emergence suggests that it too could get overtaken by the next new hyped exchange.