Jhanvi Virani

Loved chatting with Kelli Fontaine about how LPs like Cendana Capital manage risk when investing in solo GPs. It's an interesting time to raise a fund: • Some LPs will not invest in dual GPs after seeing so many breakups in the past two years 💔 • Yet others will not invest in solo GPs as they or their peers have had the unthinkable happen (solo GP becomes incapacitated and firm is in limbo). Kelli's advice for GPs was spot on – there are ways to manage this in both situations. Focus on the LPs that believe in your model; don't waste time on those that will never be comfortable with it. Thank you David Zhou for hosting me on Superclusters!

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Mag 7 isn't the only headwind for Tech as the entire Software sector remains under intense pressure. I've talked about IGV's likely near-term path but important to put this into context w/ laggards like $HUBS Last year's multi-yr trend break happened on a huge amount of volume and that high volume has persisted in recent months w/ this week's abnormally large weekly high-to-low range not too helpful. This chart makes it look like prices are getting closer to 2022 lows but keep in mind at $311.88 we're still meaningfully above $245 hit back in Fall 2022. While i expect Tech to rally into Feb, i can't make claims of a huge rally in Software which still looks premature & quite a bit weaker than Semis, or Hardware by a large margin. This area remains an Underweight within Tech and Mean Reversion types will have to be patient Happy Weekend all @IBDinvestors @marketsurge #IBDPartner

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FDIC staff have painstakingly reconstructed the daily deposit outflow data for the runs on SVB, Signature, and First Republic. Great insights from my colleagues here: https://lnkd.in/enb5S8Zm

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During the SEC roundtable yesterday Paul Atkins said a few extremely bullish things for a future of onchain programmable finance - especially at a time when the percent of crypto economic value happening in DeFi is growing dramatically and businesses like Blackrock, Robinhood, Apollo, and others are now actively engaging with or talking about engaging with onchain finance. 👇 1/ "The right to have self-custody of one’s private property is a foundational American value that should not disappear when one logs onto the internet. I am in favor of affording greater flexibility to market participants to self-custody crypto assets, especially where intermediation imposes unnecessary transaction costs or restricts the ability to engage in staking and other on-chain activities." 2/ "The idea of self-executing software code that is accessible to everyone, but controlled by no one, and that enables private, peer-to-peer transactions may sound like science fiction. But, blockchain technology makes possible an entirely new class of software that can perform these functions without an intermediary. I do not believe that we should allow century-old regulatory frameworks to stifle innovation with technologies that could upend and most importantly improve and advance our current, traditional intermediated model." 3/ "I have directed the staff to consider a conditional exemptive relief framework or “innovation exemption” that would expeditiously allow registrants and non-registrants to bring on-chain products and services to market." A significant amount of financial activity is coming onchain through stablecoins and tokenization - and the trend is only accelerating.

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Fintech PR Roundup: The financial giants are no longer just watching from the sidelines. 🏦🚀 From Northwestern Mutual’s massive $150 million bet on early-stage innovation to Macquarie’s strategic deepening of its stake in the FX lifecycle, the "Big Money" is moving aggressively into the infrastructure of tomorrow. Today’s highlights showcase a trend of institutional-grade scaling, with traditional firms using venture capital, virtual cards, and cloud-native migrations to stay ahead of the pack. Northwestern Mutual’s $150M Innovation Fund: Northwestern Mutual has announced a new $150 million venture capital commitment to accelerate fintech innovation. This investment will support startups building the next generation of financial planning, risk management, and digital health tools, ensuring the legacy carrier remains at the center of the customer’s evolving financial life. Qolo & KeyBank’s Virtual Commercial Cards: Qolo has expanded its multi-year partnership with KeyBank to launch the Key Virtual Card (KeyVC) program. By embedding virtual card issuance directly into KeyBank’s treasury platform, commercial clients can now pay suppliers and track spending with real-time controls, replacing slow manual accounts payable processes with instant digital rails. WealthAi’s Real-Time Compliance Agent: WealthAi has launched an AI-powered compliance solution designed to replace manual spot-checks for wealth managers. The system uses "always-on" agentic AI to monitor all client communications, flagging potential market abuse or regulatory risks in real time, ensuring that firms can meet increasingly strict global standards without slowing down their advisors. Macquarie Increases Stake in Tenora: Macquarie Group has increased its shareholding in the FX risk management firm Tenora to 33%, just as Tenora’s UK subsidiary secured FCA authorization as an Electronic Money Institution (EMI). This move allows Tenora to offer full FX lifecycle orchestration, from exposure hedging to cross-border settlement, all within a single regulated environment. Atos to Migrate LCH SA to the Cloud: Atos has secured a three-year agreement with LCH SA, a leading global clearing house, to migrate its critical financial information systems to a secure cloud environment. This modernization will provide LCH with the scalability and resilience needed to handle the massive volumes of global clearing data while improving operational agility and security. #Fintech #VentureCapital #BankingTech #WealthManagement #DigitalTransformation

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Former Northwestern Mutual VC chief Craig Schedler has moved to Intuit Ventures, a move he says is mirroring how #fintech is shifting to B2B. And what's hottest in B2B right now? CFO tech. Don't worry if you're a #consumer fintech investor though, #AI is set to charge your part of the market too - and in one specific area. (Link in comments for full story.)

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Interesting today to read this article from Bloomberg today validating the thinking that has gone into the design of AxleTree's $150 million New Industries Fund. Please read the article, but I would like to highlight the following statements in particular: "The venture capital model honed and perfected in Silicon Valley is proving a bad fit for the clean tech industry, and investors should instead accept that they'll need to commit much bigger sums of money for longer periods of time" AxleTree is a whole of lifecycle investor (with an emphasis on growth and patient capital), with investment and divestment decisions driven by fundamentals, not the artificial constraints of a fixed term fund. "Those are capital intensive sectors that require committed capital. That's in contrast to the 'asset light businesses' to which venture capital is best suited. If you are investing in a software business and you put in $10 million, the need for additional capital from this company might not be high, but $10 million in a climate tech company doesn't get you a whole lot of runway." AxleTree's Evergreen structure allows for future fund raising to support the necessary follow-on investments; and also provides co-investment opportunities for its investors along the way. "The problem is investors are very segmented. Different investor groups have different risk- reward preferences, and for the most part a lot of the transition theme falls in the gap between various pockets of capital, in what's known as the missing middle." The missing middle has been our focus from day one, with early stage investment and utility scale projects relatively well funded. AxleTree's fund has been structured to provide institutional and private investors exposure to this market segment which has largely been the domain of corporate investors. "It's clear what success looks like, it's project finance, it's infrastructure. That's where we need to get to, because that's the right cost of capital for a lot of these projects and companies." The best way to prove and deploy your technology may sometimes be to roll it out yourself. AxleTree will invest in both the companies behind the technology and directly into the projects using it. This means that the fund and co-investment opportunities, may straddle both private equity and infrastructure in a portfolio. And finally: "The bottom line, though, is that climate risk is real. You're living with the consequences every day, and it's a problem that has negative consequences if left unaddressed. That story does not change in my mind because of either economic cycles or political cycles." The evergreen structure was also selected with management of these cycles in mind. While the US election result had many in the sector questioning their approach to sustainability issues or "green hushing" their initiatives, the recent Australian election result gives some certainty around favourable policy settings in the medium to longer term.

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Stuart Willson is quickly becoming one of the most knowledgable people on how to successfully deploy AI into organizations effectively. He's doing a much, much needed job of helping you cut through the bs and focus on solutions that are genuine and provide real results. Really enjoyed this chat !

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Jefferies Research Analyst Brent Thill joined CNBC to discuss his view on why concerns that artificial intelligence will kill software are being over-exaggerated. The conversation explored whether many tech stocks have bottomed, how software pricing is evolving, and Thill’s outlook on what lies ahead. Watch the full interview here: http://spklr.io/6045EJtPd

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Fantastic playbook here from member Acadia.im A step-by-step guide for FinTech, data, analytics, infrastructure and service companies that want to generate demand and build qualified pipeline. Always. Build. A funnel. https://lnkd.in/e74XT9bf

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Michael V. Marrale, CEO of M Science, led the conversation on how AI and modern data architecture are reshaping trading at the Jefferies Global Equity Trading Conference. The panel explored how advanced analytics and data‑driven workflows are transforming signal discovery, liquidity evaluation, and real‑time execution across today’s markets.   Junta N. - Global Head of Financial Services and Sustainability, Databricks Chaitanya Rudra - Senior Manager, Investment Management Fintech Strategies Team, Vanguard   #MScience #Jefferies #Databricks #Vanguard #Data #AI #MScienceMaddie

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DTCC and State Street are now the two most important digital asset firms on Wall Street. I have spent two decades watching capital markets infrastructure get rebuilt. The pattern is always the same. The asset class arrives. The pundits debate. Then the post-trade utilities pick a side, and the debate ends. This week, two of them picked. 1. @DTCC announced May 4 that tokenized securities trading begins as a July pilot and reaches full launch in October. The platform sits inside the Depository Trust Company subsidiary, shaped by a fifty-plus firm working group including @BlackRock, @Goldman Sachs, @JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, NYSE, Citadel Securities, Circle, Fireblocks, Robinhood, Anchorage, and Ondo Finance. The SEC no-action letter in December covered Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries. 2. State Street announced April 28 it will launch tokenized fund servicing from Luxembourg by year end. Fund administration, custody, and transfer agency for digitally native fund structures, delivered through its Digital Asset Platform. State Street Investment Management is the first adopter. Luxembourg was chosen for its fund ecosystem and legal frameworks supporting digitally native structures. 3. @CoinGecko's Q1 2026 RWA Report, released April 30, makes the underlying market visible. Tokenized real-world assets reached 19.3 billion dollars at end of Q1, up 256.7 percent from 5.4 billion fifteen months ago. Tokenized US Treasuries are 67 percent of the market. Tokenized gold spot trading hit 90.7 billion dollars in Q1 alone, exceeding the entire 2025 full-year volume. RWA perpetual futures cleared 524.79 billion in Q1. What this rhymes with: 1995, when Cedel and Euroclear modernized European fund settlement and unlocked the institutional fund distribution decade. Second-order effect: Tokenized fund servicing becomes a standard procurement category alongside custody, transfer agency, and fund administration. Asset managers without a tokenization plan in their next RFI will answer for it in their Q1 2027 board package. For institutions: Decide which post-trade utility you anchor to before pricing power consolidates. After October, you inherit the choice. Institutions don't adopt narratives. They adopt infrastructure. — Rob Frasca | COSIMO Digital | Capital markets, rebuilt on-chain, amplified by AI #RWA #Tokenization #CapitalMarkets

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I’ve been thinking about how Liquidity is a polite word for a blunt reality. When you most need it, it has a habit of becoming conditional. Foucault, Pagano, and Röell’s Market Liquidity: Theory, Evidence, and Policy is valuable because it refuses to let us hide behind the screen. It pushes you to treat liquidity like an execution problem, not a market mood. It is not “is there a quote.” It is “can I get done, at size, without donating a limb.” The part that still feels under-discussed in day to day market chatter is the split between delay and impact. Everyone obsesses over impact because it is dramatic. Delay is quieter. Delay is the cost that smiles at you, lets you wait for “a better price,” then bills you in missed fills, partial fills, and a market that has moved on without you. In a world of faster information and faster reactions, time is not a neutral dimension. Time is a risk factor you are holding. This is why the quoted spread is the most comforting metric in the business. It is clean. It is visible. It is also, in the wrong hands, cosmetic. Best ask, best bid, take the difference, scale it by the midpoint if you want to sound empirical. Fine. But it is still a measure of what the market is willing to advertise at the point of observation. The effective spread is where the poetry ends and the architecture work begins. It drags in the transaction price and forces honesty. What did you actually pay relative to the midquote just before you traded. That is the moment phantom liquidity gets caught. You can have a market that looks tight, yet trades wide. A market that looks deep, yet slips. A market that looks fair, yet extracts. If your quoted spread reads like a discount retailer but your effective spread prints like luxury tax, you have not discovered a mystery. You have discovered the difference between appearance and access. Then there is the realised spread, which is the closest thing to a moral audit you will find in microstructure without anyone using moral language. It asks. Of what I paid, how much did the liquidity supplier truly earn, and how much was simply the market repricing because my trade carried information. When realised sits well below effective, it is usually not “efficiency.” It is the market admitting, after the fact, that it learned something from you. That is adverse selection wearing a spreadsheet. If you want the bridge from execution costs to risk management, price impact is the blunt instrument that still works. Think of lambda as the market’s load-bearing capacity. When it rises, the same signed imbalance moves price more. Depth has not merely worsened. The whole system has become easier to tilt. In those moments, liquidity is not a feature of the asset. It is a feature of the market’s willingness to warehouse risk.

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