TheChek News Flow

Big raises slowed for the second week in a row. Only a handful of rounds hit nine digits this week, although a large half-billion-dollar round led the way.

1. Nerdio, $500M, information technology: IT professionals are stretched pretty thin these days, so it makes sense that a company that helps automate some of their work could raise big. That’s exactly what Nerdio did. The Chicago-based company raised a $500 million equity round from General Atlantic that values it at $1.2 billion, according to Bloomberg. While the company may be under the radar for some, it says it has more than 15,000 customers in 50 countries, is profitable and growing annual recurring revenue more than 85% year to year. Founded in 1998, Nerdio has raised $625 million, per Crunchbase.

2. Latigo Biotherapeutics, $150M, biotech: Many patients shy away from taking opioids while many doctors are reluctant to prescribe the painkillers. Thousand Oaks, California-based Latigo Biotherapeutics is developing a completely different option for pain relief and raised a $150 million Series B led by funds managed by Blue Owl for it. The clinical-stage biotechnology company is developing new nonopioid pain treatments that target pain at its source. The fresh cash will support the advancement of the company’s Nav1.8 inhibitors currently in clinical development. Founded in 2018, the company has raised $300 million, per Crunchbase.

3. BuildOps, $127M, commercial contracting: Santa Monica, California-based BuildOps, a software platform to manage contracting projects from construction through to maintenance, addresses a $300 billion industry with hundreds of thousands of skilled workers from electricians to plumbers to HVAC professionals. The platform manages projects from scheduling to dispatching and invoicing. The funding was led by Meritech Capital Partners with participation from Bond and SE Ventures, among others. Founded in 2018, the company has raised over $225 million, per Crunchbase.

4. Curevo, $110M, biotech: Seattle-based Curevo, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing vaccinations for infectious disease, closed a $110 million Series B led by new investor Medicxi. The money will be used to advance the development of amezosvatein, a vaccine to prevent shingles — a serious medical condition involving a painful, blistering skin rash where 10% to 18% of people also develop serious, long‑lasting nerve pain, per the company. Founded in 2018, the company has raised $196 million, per Crunchbase.

5. Dataminr, $85M, analytics: Dataminr has been seemingly quiet on the fundraising front for a while now. Back in 2021, the data and analytics company raised a $475 million round at a $4.1 billion valuation. Since then, however, the company laid off 20% of its staff in November 2023. The company — which calls itself “one of the world’s leading AI companies” — secured $85 million in new funding from HSBC and NightDragon through a combination of convertible financing and credit. No new valuation was announced. In addition, NightDragon also intends to create a special-purpose vehicle for up to an additional $100 million in convertible financing available to third-party investors. The New York-based company has a real-time platform for detecting events, risks and critical information from public data signals and is approaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue. Founded in 2009, the company has raised $1.1 billion, per Crunchbase.

6. Arbor Biotechnologies, $74M, biotech: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Arbor Biotechnologies, a biotech developing genetic medicines, closed a $73.9 million Series C led by Arch Venture Partners and TCG Crossover. Founded in 2016, the company has raised nearly $305 million, per Crunchbase.

7. Ampersand Biomedicines, $65M, biotech: Boston-based Ampersand Biomedicines, a biotech creating medicines designed to act specifically at the site of disease, secured a $65 million Series B. No lead investor was named, but those participating include Flagship Pioneering and Eli Lilly. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $115 million, per Crunchbase.

8. Carbon Arc, $56M, information technology: New York-based Carbon Arc, a provider of structured, model-ready data, launched and announced it has raised a $56 million round led by Liberty City Ventures.

9. Cardiac Dimensions, $53M, medical device: Kirkland, Washington-based Cardiac Dimension has developed a minimally invasive device for heart failure patients at risk of functional mitral regurgitation (FMR). The funding will be used to support international expansion and complete trial studies in the U.S. The series E funding was led by Ally Bridge Group with participation from existing investors. Cardiac Dimensions has raised nearly $263 million, per Crunchbase.

10. Graphite, $52M, developer tools: New York-based Graphite, a code review dashboard, raised a $52 million Series B led by Accel. Founded in 2020, the company has raised $72 million, per Crunchbase.

The biggest raise outside the U.S. this week went to a biotech startup.

Keep tabs on the latest announcements and executive orders

Google just made its biggest deal ever for Wiz, a cybersecurity startup founded only five years ago. It’s even unlikelier than it sounds.

There are good times to start a company, bad times to start a company—and March 2020.

As it happens, that’s when four Israeli tech entrepreneurs decided to start their latest company. Within days, the founders of a cybersecurity startup called Wiz began to worry that they had made a terrible mistake.

They had left stable jobs right before a pandemic sparked the most extraordinarily unstable moments of their lifetimes. Markets freaked. Fear spiked. It seemed like they had managed to pick the worst possible time to start a company.

“In retrospect,” said Assaf Rappaport, Wiz’s chief executive, “that was the best timing to start a company.”

In fact, if you asked him to choose the single greatest time in history to start a company that specializes in cloud security, he says he would pick March 2020. And it would be hard to argue with him after this past week, when Google parent Alphabet GOOGL 0.73%increase; green up pointing triangle agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion.

It’s by far the biggest deal in Google’s history and one of the biggest ever in Silicon Valley.

It’s also bigger than the $23 billion deal Google tried to make for Wiz just last summer, before talks fell apart.

And it’s much bigger than anyone would have imagined five years ago, when the only thing that felt like it was falling apart was the entire world.

But it turns out there is a long history of crises and chaos producing wildly successful companies at the exact moment when you might least expect it.

“Dark times, not boom times, are great times to start companies,” says Doug Leone, a Sequoia Capital partner who led the firm’s early Wiz investment.

It’s a counterintuitive theory, so I asked him to elaborate.

In dark times, he explained, there is usually less hiring competition and fewer “lookalike companies” pursuing the same ideas. These moments of uncertainty also tend to attract the sorts of entrepreneurs with the right amount of chutzpah, the ones who “just can’t help themselves and can’t go to sleep at night because they’re so excited about starting a company,” Leone said.

Sift through the wreckage of dark times and it won’t take long to find a company that rose from the ashes. Hewlett-Packard emerged from the Great Depression. Uber and Airbnb came out of the 2008 financial crisis. Google itself benefited from the abundance of cheap real estate and engineering talent after the dot-com bust.

But perhaps never has a company become so valuable in so little time and under such peculiar circumstances as Wiz.

Long before they signed the deal that would make them all billionaires, Rappaport met co-founders Ami Luttwak, Roy Reznik and Yinon Costica as soldiers in 2001.

They were recruited to Unit 8200, the elite intelligence division of the Israeli army that has also become a world-class tech incubator. These days, Unit 8200 pumps out cybersecurity entrepreneurs like the University of Alabama produces NFL players.

After leaving the military, their first startup was another cloud-security company they founded in 2012 and sold in 2015 for $320 million to Microsoft, where Rappaport led the tech giant’s research and development in Israel until he left in early 2020.

It was time to build his next startup.

Wiz’s software was developed to help companies fortify their cloud systems, recognizing and fending off hacks, threats and other security risks. Over time, the startup raised $1.9 billion from some of the world’s richest people and prominent venture capitalists who stand to make a killing from the all-cash Google deal.

In the beginning, Rappaport and his co-founders knew they would be able to get funding. What they didn’t know was what they wanted to do with it. They spent a few weeks toying with cybersecurity ideas around a table in Tel Aviv before deciding that Wiz would focus on the cloud—just in time to be engulfed by dark clouds.

That was the moment when even Rappaport questioned his own wisdom.

“To run a startup, that’s risky,” he said a year later. “To run a startup during a pandemic, that’s never done before.”

Of all the people who found themselves running startups during the pandemic, Wiz’s founders had several advantages working in their favor. By then, they had known each other for decades and didn’t have to be in the same room to collaborate. They also knew how their skills and personalities complemented each other’s. They even had the same investors from their last startup.

And it turned out they had impeccable timing, too.

They couldn’t have predicted it, but Covid would dramatically accelerate a race to the cloud—and the growth of their company.

I know you’d rather sit through a lecture on cloud security than spend another second reliving the pandemic, but stay with me here.

At the beginning of March 2020, most chief information-security officers (CISOs) would have said they were perfectly comfortable with their cloud protection. But the Wiz founders had the vision to see the business was shifting. Data was already moving from servers hosted locally on a company’s physical servers to the digital cloud. And that migration was about to be turbocharged.

By the end of March 2020, they looked prescient.

As companies embraced remote work, they exposed themselves to all kinds of vulnerabilities that hackers were ready to exploit. Software for better cloud security might have been considered a niche product at any other point in history—until it became a priority for just about every major company on the planet.

One unexpected benefit of starting a company during a pandemic is that meetings that would have taken weeks to arrange took days or hours. Since the Wiz founders couldn’t go anywhere, they suddenly could meet anyone, anytime.

And everyone wanted to meet them.

Any company going from zero to a $32 billion deal in five years seems a bit like wizardry. For Wiz, it was mostly the result of strategy.

The key insight behind this company was that as security threats got more complex, Wiz’s product had to get simpler.

Even when they were in stealth mode, Wiz’s founders had an unusual clarity about the product they wanted to build. And because of the circumstances, they could hire some of the best engineers in Israel to help build it.

What they built was so effective that Wiz employees could install it on a sales call and identify a company’s threats by the time they hung up. It was intuitive enough that any CISO could quickly learn how to use it, but comprehensive enough that CISOs actually wanted to use it. It was also weirdly fun to use.

“Most people treat enterprise software like they’re trying to punish you,” said Neil Mehta, the founder and managing partner of Greenoaks Capital, a Wiz investor. “This is actually a delightful product—the first time I’ve ever said that about cybersecurity.”

All of which explains why the company’s value skyrocketed over five years—and even since last summer.

After negotiations with Google fizzled less than nine months ago, Wiz grew so much that the deal got $9 billion sweeter.

Now the price was right. And this time, so was the timing.

A Piece of Glass Thinner Than a Credit Card Could Solve America’s $25 Billion Energy Problem

New windows can insulate better than most walls, and some can even survive being hit with a two-by-four shot from a cannon

Here’s one more thing we owe to the restless mind of Steve Jobs: hyper-efficient, ultra-tough windows for homes.

This new kind of window could save American households billions of dollars in wasted energy each year, while allowing expansive views of the outdoors and making our homes quieter, more comfortable and able to survive even the most violent weather. The key enabling technology is thin panes of glass—sandwiched between thicker standard glass—which exist because of the same manufacturing and chemistry breakthroughs that made possible the light, strong, scratch-resistant screens on our smartphones, tablets and watches.

Typical double-pane windows have hardly changed since their invention a century ago. Filling them with inert gases or adding coatings to reflect or let in heat has made them more effective. But it’s still generally accepted that, all other things being equal, your home’s energy bills will go up or down based on how many windows you have, and how big they are.

“Windows are always viewed as the problem, because windows typically lose 10 to 20 times more energy per square foot than a well-insulated wall,” says Stephen Selkowitz, an affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a dean in the field of building energy efficiency. The Energy Department estimates that U.S. households each waste $200 to $400 a year on energy bills due to drafts, leaks and inefficiencies, for a total of at least $25 billion a year.

These new three- and four-pane windows can be even better insulators than the walls around them, but cost only about 20% more than standard energy-efficient windows. Installing them could bring big energy savings for those ready to retrofit, and could enable the construction of new homes that are so well-insulated that even when the power goes out in a winter storm, they stay warm for days. Another variant of these windows can meet the most stringent hurricane-related building codes in the country, while being significantly lighter than conventional stormproof windows.

The bad news is that Joe and Jane Consumer won’t be able to buy these kinds of windows at the local home-supply store—at least not yet. While the primary manufacturer of this type of window is offering its tech to other window makers, it’s only opened up U.S. production in the past few months, and it’s still scaling up manufacturing.

Bringing the panes

Scientists have long known the key to more efficient windows is similar to the relationship between razorblades and a closer shave: More is better. But it was hard to translate that into a product that could be mass manufactured, at a price that people would be willing to pay, says Selkowitz.

Enter Corning, maker of the thin, tough Gorilla Glass that has helped make possible today’s mobile devices. In order to win over Steve Jobs and land Apple as a client when it first started making iPhones, Corning offered Apple a fresh twist on its existing process for making glass for LCD displays and other applications, which yielded a new kind of chemically strengthened glass.

Traditional glass, called soda-lime glass, is made by floating molten glass on top of molten tin, which is a cheap and effective process but leaves microscopic flaws. With Gorilla Glass, molten glass with different additives than soda-lime glass cascades in a waterfall as thin as half a millimeter, which rapidly cools and is cut to size, yielding glass that is nearly flawless. The glass is also chemically strengthened, making it resistant to scratches and chipping.

As the smartphone industry ramped up, Corning built more factories to meet demand for Gorilla Glass. Some of these factories now use the same process, with a slightly modified chemistry, to create far larger sheets of similarly tough glass, for windows instead of hand-held devices. These sheets of glass are thinner than a credit card, yet they can be bigger than a queen-size mattress, says Ron Verkleeren, senior vice president of Corning’s emerging-innovations group.

This architectural glass doesn’t yet have a compelling name like Gorilla Glass, but they’re working on it, he adds. (“Orangutan Glass” has my vote.)

When three or even four layers of glass are put together, with inert gas in between, only the interior panes are the super-thin Corning panes, and they add little weight to the finished product.

When you go from a single air gap to the two or three that are possible with triple- and quad-pane windows, the insulating ability of a window can skyrocket, says Selkowitz, who has collaborated at the federally funded Lawrence Berkeley lab with Alpen, a Colorado-based maker of specialty windows, to research their capabilities.

Efficiency and more

Alpen’s windows have long been favored by architects who want to build super energy-efficient homes. Corning began collaborating with Alpen about five years ago, and now the company is ready to mass-manufacture reinforced windows at two facilities, one in Colorado and one in Pennsylvania. The first wave will be windows in standard sizes, says Andrew Zech, Alpen’s CEO. Key to keeping costs down are the company’s new automated, high-throughput assembly lines for making the windows, he adds.

David Schleicher, managing director of Kala, a high-performance builder in Kansas City, Mo., has been living with a wall of triple-pane windows comparable to Alpen’s on the south side of his home since 2015. Typically, such a vast expanse of glass—a total of 16 feet by 7—would create an unpleasantly cold patch during the winter. But this glass is so well insulated, it actually creates warmth in his living room: It admits the radiant heat of the low winter sun but prevents conductive heat loss through the window, says Schleicher.

“With the right glass in my house, my heat won’t even be running on a winter day, as long as the sun is shining and it’s coming in the window,” he says. “It is crazy—I will be in shorts and a T-shirt and it’s 20 degrees outside. Meanwhile, my neighbors are paying out the nose in heating and cooling bills.”

Whether or not these innovative new windows take off depends largely on the demand from builders, homeowners and landlords.

Historically, the biggest reason that energy-efficient technologies get adopted is that building codes require them, says Schleicher. Without explicit regulations that enforce minimum standards, builders often seek deals on materials so that they can maximize profits, and businesses and individuals who rent out properties often have little incentive to reduce tenants’ month-to-month energy bills.

Slashing home energy bills is just the next chapter for the tech that brought us smartphone glass.

Miter Brands is producing windows in North Venice, Fla. in which it layers Corning’s tough glass onto windows designed to withstand hurricane-force winds. Previously, the company’s impact-resistant glass doors weighed up to 600 pounds; using Corning thin glass inside has cut the weight by up to 40%, says Dean Ruark, vice president of engineering and innovation at Miter subsidiary PGT Innovations.

Despite being lighter, these new doors can pass the most stringent hurricane testing in the country: Miami Dade’s building codes for hurricane resistance. This involves withstanding ​​air pressure equivalent to a major hurricane, and a two-by-four fired from a cannon at 34 miles an hour…twice.

Abu Dhabi’s quest to turn its DNA ‘gold mine’ into big business

Project backed by national security chief Sheikh Tahnoon aims to commercialise mammoth Emirati genetic database

In an underground facility below Abu Dhabi’s science and technology district, workers in lab coats run samples through centrifuge machines, slot vials into industrial-sized freezers and tend to rows of photocopier-like genetic sequencing machines.

Those 55 sequencing devices, each one worth tens of thousands of dollars, represent the highest concentration of such equipment outside the US, their owners say. And they signal the oil-rich emirate’s investment in a powerful, and potentially highly profitable, new resource: its citizens’ DNA.

Abu Dhabi’s biggest healthcare company M42, chaired by powerful Abu Dhabi royal and United Arab Emirates national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, says it has sequenced 802,000 genomes, including from 702,000 Emiratis. At just under three-quarters of the local population, that makes it one of the most comprehensive genetic population data sets in the world.

M42 is now seeking to capitalise on this DNA to exploit the growing power of genetic databases to drive breakthroughs in combating disease — and eventually attract drug companies and foster a life sciences industry in Abu Dhabi. George Haber, chief executive of M42’s Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, called the Abu Dhabi-owned Emirati Genome Programme a “gold mine of data”.

The project is part of a broader plan by Abu Dhabi to attract advanced industries, diversify the economy and lessen its dependence on fossil fuel revenues.

A brother of UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Sheikh Tahnoon has wide-ranging influence over the wealthy emirate’s economy and foreign policy with a business empire that includes M42’s parent company G42, the UAE’s most significant AI group.

A ju-jitsu enthusiast reputed to take some meetings while cycling, the 57-year-old is said to take a keen interest in technologies that lengthen life expectancy.

Under the sheikh’s supervision, M42 has invested heavily in genetics. Hasan Jasem Al Nowais, the group’s chief executive, said Sheikh Tahnoon was “very involved” in setting strategy, directing “where we need to go and [saying] ‘This is where the ultimate goal is.’”

Emiratis were reluctant to hand over their genetic code when the project began more than five years ago, but many followed suit when Abu Dhabi royals, including foreign affairs minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, took the blood tests needed for the programme. The pandemic boosted the voluntary collection, with M42 sampling participants for the EGP alongside coronavirus testing. 

The genetic trove’s extensive scope has raised hopes that it can help tackle health problems prevalent in the UAE, such as inherited conditions due to intermarriage, as well as broader international health threats. Other facilities, such as the 19-year-old UK Biobank of about 500,000 people, have yielded crucial advances on illnesses from obesity to Parkinson’s disease.

Although M42 executives stress that the three-year-old company’s efforts to commercialise are still in early stages, the group’s strong ties to the government and Abu Dhabi’s ruling family give it a unique advantage.

M42 was formed in 2022 from a merger of the healthcare assets under sovereign investor Mubadala and Sheikh Tahnoon’s G42. At the time, Mubadala took a 45 per cent interest in the combined group, according to its bond prospectus. M42 declined to give ownership details.

The health group’s assets include hospitals, such as Abu Dhabi’s Cleveland Clinic. Though M42 generates almost half of its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation from overseas, the company was initially dependent on government contracts, such as delivering the EGP.

M42’s massive collection of data also spans Abu Dhabi’s unified patient records system, its Biobank and environmental data from monitoring waste water for disease outbreaks. It uses artificial intelligence to analyse information across the data sets, senior operations director Albarah El Khani said.

Separately, it conducts premarital screening for Emirati couples, which the government encourages due to concerns over intermarriage.

Although Abu Dhabi’s health department owns the anonymised genetic information and grants access to it, M42 collects and stores the data as its custodian. No other company has been given approval to use the data, M42 says. That gives M42 an effective monopoly for now.

M42 says it has strict protocols to protect participants’ data and prevent misuse. But campaigners have long accused Abu Dhabi, an absolute monarchy, of compromising privacy and wielding broad surveillance powers.

Some American lawmakers have also been wary of its links to China. G42 has been dogged by accusations of links to Chinese entities blacklisted by the US over alleged repression of minorities, including the Beijing Genomics Institute.

To appease the US, which it relies on for access to cutting-edge semiconductors, G42 has said it divested from Chinese companies and would remove all Huawei hardware from its systems. M42 said it did not have ties to BGI or use its equipment.

Other countries such as Iceland have created large genetic databases, but the UAE’s is among the most comprehensive. The UK Biobank includes whole genome sequencing for 500,000 participants, although the nation’s population is more than 68mn.

Paul Jones, chief executive of M42’s Omics Centre, said the UAE’s insights into such a large proportion of the population meant researchers could track a genetic mutation across multiple generations. Although 90 per cent of the UAE’s population are foreigners, Emiratis still mostly marry within the community.

“You can monitor disease across grandparents, parents, children, and you can start to plot,” said Jones. “From a research perspective, it’s gold dust in terms of giving you an insight into mutations that are relevant for specific disease”.

Pharmaceutical companies’ “perception of what would be really valuable is not just access to the data set, but access to the [health] system itself”, said Jones, who is the former chief executive of Genomics England.

No deals have been signed, but M42 group executives say the company is talking to international pharmaceutical and biotech companies about using the data and there are precedents for how they could sell access.

The UK Biobank, for example, has struck agreements with life sciences businesses to fund analytical work using its data, such as a project looking at how changes in the levels of proteins in the body are linked to diseases. In return, the companies receive exclusive access to the results for nine months before they are made public.

Chief executive Nowais said M42 had started sequencing genomes from expat UAE residents to broaden the genetic storehouse, which he said could increase its attractiveness to companies that would want to use it to develop drugs.

M42 is in talks to work with governments in other countries and recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Uzbekistan to partner on its genome programme. M42 would not control the data, but “what we will have access to is insights from the data”, Nowais said.

That means M42 can tell pharmaceutical companies, “‘we have sequenced X number of people in Kenya and Malaysia and Indonesia, and we have diversity within our data’”, said Nowais. “‘But if you want more complex patients, want diabetic patients, I have the Abu Dhabi population.’”

In September 1843, Victor Hugo was on a sunlit walk while travelling with his mistress in the Pyrenees. He stepped into a café to rest, picked up a newspaper and read of a tragic accident in Normandy. On a calm day on the Seine, a sudden squall capsized a rowing boat carrying a young couple. She, 19 and pregnant, was pulled down by her heavy dress; he leapt into the water to save her; both drowned.

Hugo’s favourite child Léopoldine was already buried when he learned that day of her death. Devastated, he wrote little and published nothing for the next decade. But he did draw: as imaginatively, sensuously, eccentrically as one would expect, and with a naturally graceful line and compositional flair. Seventy superb pieces feature in the Royal Academy’s Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. Doubly appealing, the exhibition offers both biographical revelation and a scarcely known, very beautiful chapter in 19th-century graphic art in its heyday of Daumier and Doré.

Hugo had always sketched — 3,000 drawings survive. After 1843, however, he became a draughtsman of real originality and expressive depths, working in fine pencil, smoky charcoal, wet inks, gouache and coloured washes, repeatedly creating images of drowning and submerged worlds. For “The Wreck”, he dragged the feathered end of an ink-dipped quill across the page to depict overpowering waves. “City on the Rhine” is flooded in brown wash, the buildings hardly visible. The whole sheet for “Taches-Planètes” was soaked in water and splodged with pools of ink and stencilled circles.

Sometimes these works appear to be spontaneous explorations, paper randomly stained, blotted, streaked, but the most refined examples combine fluidity with intricate structure. Composed of many layers, the detailed tower of the dread “La Tour des Rats” — a Rhineland bastion where by legend a ruler burnt to death the poor, who returned as rats and devoured him — is dashed with teeming rain, evoked by pulling an inky cloth across the paper. Pen, ink, pencil, crayon and charcoal imitate stone and wood in the impenetrable interior “Hic Clavis, alias porta” (Here the key, elsewhere the door) — an allegory for the claustrophobia of grief.

Victor Hugo’s ‘La Tour des Rats’ (1847) © Royal Academy of Arts/Paris Musées/Maison de Victor Hugo/Hauteville House

Hugo's The Castle with the Angel’ (c1863) © Royal Academy of Arts/Paris Musées/Maison de Victor Hugo/Hauteville Hous

But if Gothic fantasy reigns, every now and then some experimental mixed-media curiosity — a castle and winding stair imprinted with coloured lace in “Les Orientales”, a postage stamp collaged into “Taches and Silhouette of a Castle” — aligns Hugo instead with the 20th-century avant-garde.

Untrained, untethered by academic convention, he can be purely abstract — the flurry of ink blotches “Twilight, stubborn, black, hideous” — or darkly metamorphosing like the surrealists. A universe becomes a black pupil in “Planet-Eye”. Finger marks are blank heads surveying an abyss in “Ink-blackened Page with Half-moon and Fingerprints”. In a stunning scale reversal, a giant arachnid hovers above a minuscule city in “The Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider’s Web”.

The Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider’s Web’ (1871) © Royal Academy of Arts/Paris Musées/Maison de Victor Hugo/Hauteville Hous

This is not to claim Hugo was a modernist in waiting. On the contrary, he was a medievalist, seeking in Gothic spirituality and ornament a refuge from the industrialising 19th century. In this sense he was an internal exile, cloistered in medieval imagining, even before he became in 1851 an actual political exile, opposing Napoleon III’s autocratic Second Empire.

Until Napoleon’s regime collapsed in 1870, Hugo lived in Guernsey. From a lookout at the top of his house, he wrote: “I watch the flow being born, expiring, reborn, and the gulls cutting through the air. The ships in the wind open their wingspans, and look in the distance like large figures strolling on the sea.” The vista contributed to the drawings’ floating sensations and hybrid forms — one sketchbook brims with an orchestra of gargoyle-like human-animal musicians — and, when he returned to novel-writing, to Les Misérables (1862), suffused with drowning images, and his homage to the island Toilers of the Sea (1866).

The final room connects the Guernsey novel — story of Gilliatt, a fisherman battling to rescue an engine from a shipwreck and thus win his beloved — with drawings, including the black vortex “The Vision Ship, or The Last Struggle”, and the sublimely lovely “Octopus”, a single ink stain brushed into contours of body and limbs curling into the initials V H. Hiding in “the most beautiful azure of the limpid water”, this creature — “devil-fish . . . a glutinous mass possessed of a will . . . glue filled with hatred” — entraps Gilliatt.

Octopus’ (1866-69) © Royal Academy of Arts/Paris Musées/Maison de Victor Hugo/Bibliothèque nationale de France

Hugo professed himself optimistic, predicting a war-free 20th century and explaining Les Misérables as a “progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice . . . night to day”. The drawings, made “during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen”, are emotionally varied, expressing wonder, fear, loss.

In “Mushroom”, an enormous green and red fungus with eerie peering face rises above a destroyed landscape, uncannily anticipating nuclear apocalypse, not peace. In “The Shade of the Manchineel Tree”, the toxic tree — merely standing beneath it burns the skin — casts an inky skull as its reflection and double, twinning growth and death. An inscription sets the scene in the Pyrenees “breathing heat like the mouth of an oven”, where a man shelters only to find his sanctuary fatal, as Hugo did in the café when he discovered Léopoldine had drowned.

‘Mushroom’ (1850) © Royal Academy of Arts/Paris Musées/Maison de Victor Hugo/Hauteville Hous

Hugo never exhibited his drawings, although they were known and praised in French romantic circles: Delacroix admired them; Théophile Gautier wrote that Hugo “excels in blending the chiaroscuro effects of Goya with the architectural terror of Piranesi”. That implies, though, a strategised aesthetic, whereas for Hugo a pleasure was freedom of style, giving form to dreams unconstrained by narrative demands. To Baudelaire, he explained: “I’ve ended up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, soot and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to convey more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind.” To wander into that mind’s eye at the Royal Academy is a rare delight.

To June 29, royalacademy.org.uk

Bill Ackman and Novak Djokovic show Big Tennis no love

The pair argue that players are being short-changed by the game’s power brokers

Organisers of the US Open tennis championship last year sold more than 500,000 of their signature cocktail, “Honey Deuce”. At $23 per glass, the drink grossed $13mn. By contrast, the men’s and women’s champions of the New York City event took home combined prize money of just $7mn.

To Bill Ackman and Novak Djokovic, that gap is a problem worthy of a US federal court lawsuit. The pair — one a hedge fund manager and the other a tennis champion — are friends, culture war contrarians and partners in the Professional Tennis Players Association, a new-ish group that purports to stand up for players. It most recently contends that tennis stars are being harmed by an antitrust conspiracy among the game’s power brokers.

Sports isn’t like other industries when it comes to market forces. Economists, legislators and courts have found that constraining competition to limit the number of leagues actually increases the pie. In winner-takes-all showdowns, having as many players competing together as possible increases dramatic tension, fan interest and advertising revenue.

The result is indeed a huge pie. But the actual competitors — the players — think their slice is not big enough. Labour disputes between on-field talent and the suits who stage the matches are commonplace. The vast fortunes now being minted through television rights have only left the gladiators wondering why they are not richer.

The PTPA says in its lawsuit that prize money for professional tennis players only adds up to perhaps a fifth of gross revenue. In big team sports such as American football and basketball the players have collectively bargained for about half of revenue. That’s particularly harsh on tennis players, who — as individuals rather than players on a team — each bear their own training and travel costs. Their season also lasts for 11 months as it follows the sun across the globe.

In this antitrust battle there’s no clear favourite. True, the $186mn in total prize money earned by Djokovic is exceptional. Only the top players earn a fine living, and that while risking constant injury. That said, the ATP, which oversees the professional men’s game, argues big bonus pools, minimum wins for even medium-ranked athletes and financial transparency have become the norm.

It might come down to views on what counts as generous to players. At last year’s US Open, singles players eliminated in the first round still got a healthy $100,000. The total gross purse for the tournament was a record-breaking $75mn. Ackman is used to tossing around big numbers and causing a ruckus; Djokovic is better at emerging as a winner. The case will be an intriguing test of whether the two, from very different backgrounds, work as doubles partners.

The country’s ability to think on an issue-by-issue basis is rare in a tribal era

A nation that has 44 Michelin stars, earns a fortune from visiting diners and then invents the appetite suppressant Ozempic is either multitalented, or very foolish. Either way, I am in the Danish capital again. If it isn’t the restaurants that make Copenhagen my favourite city in the world of this size, then it might be the architectural mix, or the unforced bohemia. It was said of the Frederiksberg-born Michael Laudrup that he would have been the greatest footballer ever, but came from too benign a setting. This always seemed to me like determinist nonsense. Looking around, I wonder . . .

For a politics nut, Denmark has another point of interest. It is one of the hardest countries to place philosophically. It presents as left-liberal, but is tough-ish on immigration. (The foreign-born are 12 per cent of the population, to Sweden’s 21.) Welfare is generous but bosses can hire and fire with some freedom. (“Flexicurity” is the unbeautiful word for this blend of market forces and paternalism.) Even in its foreign dealings, Denmark is a cuddly aid donor and founding member of Nato, with none of the neutrality that Sweden kept up until it became unsafe and unconscionable. 

It is almost as if — can you believe it? — the country approaches each issue on its own terms. Regular readers might be familiar with Ganesh’s Vibes Theory of Politics: that people don’t work out their beliefs, but take them as a kind of bundled software once they decide they are Team Liberal or Team Maga. It explains why, once you know someone’s view on Gaza, you can extrapolate with depressing accuracy their view on austerity, climate, lockdowns, DEI and other such miscellany.  

Well, those who buck the habit, who think case-by-case, need writing about too. The retired judge Jonathan Sumption is the only person of note I can think of in British public life who supports the EU but not the European Convention on Human Rights. This is despite his stance being entirely consistent (and, who knows, the future policy of the country). There are people of sublime intelligence and round-the-clock political engagement who don’t know the two institutions are different. What matters to them, I sense, is that both are liberal “coded”, and therefore both good, or both malevolent, depending on one’s priors.  

Who else has what we might call a Danish — that is, heterodox — cast of mind? The journalist Peter Hitchens is a church-and-king conservative with un-Tory views about trade unions, government housing and even the second world war. (Just as his brother Christopher, at the height of his leftism, backed Margaret Thatcher over the Falklands.) Who among Jeremy Clarkson’s fans or enemies knows that he has favoured a “liberal United States of Europe”, with “one army”, since long before the shocks of the past month or so?   

The tragedy is that, in a tribal era, this kind of thing comes across as scattiness or wilful contrarianism, when it is just the mark of a thinking person.

And “tragedy” isn’t too histrionic a word. How bad things get in the coming years, how much of the democratic west survives, depends on whether conservatives who now sense that something hideous is going on can resist the impulse to stick with the team. I have peers who came to Maga through one reason or another — hatred of woke, typically, but the lockdown was another factor, as was bourgeois boredom — who will have to make a decision soon enough. Will they approach issues on their own terms, and therefore see the obvious economic, constitutional and geopolitical reasons to get off the train? Or will the emotional comfort of a political tribe, the structure and belonging it provides in atomised times, carry them along to who knows where? The likes of John Bolton show that one can be a nationalist, even a jingo, without signing up for the entire Trumpist creed. Next to him, the British right seems tongue-tied and almost catatonic of late.

In the end, the case-by-case pragmatism of Danish statecraft is only so much of a model. If everyone worked out their beliefs on every subject from first principles, not much else would get done. If nothing else, then, the tribalist approach to ideas is efficient. Just mind you get the right tribe.

The changes now being wrought will lead to more factories and require more power, automation, and artificial intelligence to run them.

President Donald Trump’s plan to upend decades of economic orthodoxy by bringing manufacturing home has economists, politicians, and investors reeling. But one thing is certain: Making more in America will provide some serious momentum for industrial stocks.

President Donald Trump’s plan to upend decades of economic orthodoxy by bringing manufacturing home has economists, politicians, and investors reeling. But one thing is certain: Making more in America will provide some serious momentum for industrial stocks.

It has been a long time since the U.S. could be considered the dominant manufacturer in the world. Since 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, America’s share of global manufacturing has dropped to 15% from 25%. Factories that made everything from wireless routers to chairs to T-shirts moved overseas as companies chased the lowest costs regardless of location. The result was good for U.S. companies and shoppers, even if it was bad for factory workers—five million well-paying jobs disappeared—and tough for the country, which gradually forfeited its industrial edge.

Now, the Trump administration wants to bring it all back home. If it succeeds, gone will be the cheap clothes, TVs, and tchotchkes that shoppers compulsively buy, replaced by more expensive American-made goods. At least that is the goal, according to Vice President JD Vance. “Being able to make things is good because it creates self-sufficiency as a nation, and it creates self-sufficiency in our people,” he said in a speech in Michigan on March 14. “And more importantly, manufacturing jobs are good for our workers.”

Change is never easy, especially when it aims to remake an economy that has been the envy of the rest of the world. Today, much of the manufacturing expertise is located overseas—chips in Taiwan, lithium-ion batteries in China, robots in Japan. The tool of choice, tariffs, will raise prices for U.S. shoppers, reduce consumption, and slow growth. The levies will also raise the cost of production for companies while reducing profit margins. Their chaotic implementation hasn’t helped, and it threatens to bring the economy to a full stop if companies and shoppers become paralyzed by uncertainty.

But investors shouldn’t let a possible policy-induced recession distract them from the looming renaissance in U.S. manufacturing. The changes being wrought—changes that began during the first Trump administration and continued through the Covid pandemic, when companies experienced the downside of overly extended supply chains—will lead to more factories and require more power, automation, and artificial intelligence to run them. Ultimately, shares of companies that can bring this vision to life, such as Eaton, GE Vernova, and Rockwell Automation, will benefit.

“For 20 years, the thesis was that we can live in an asset-light world. Then, all of a sudden, it turns out that to make all these things…we need assets,” says BofA Securities analyst Andrew Obin. “Industrials are going to be a very good place.”

Rebuilding America’s industrial capacity won’t come cheap. Construction spending for manufacturing facilities grew 20% in 2024 to $232 billion, up threefold from 2019. BofA expects “high-single-digit growth” in 2025, driven by “megaprojects”—those with budgets north of a billion dollars. At the end of 2024, electrical-equipment maker Eaton put the backlog of all such projects in North America at $1.9 trillion, up 33% from the year before. Ground was broken on just 15% of the projects, with a record number of starts expected in 2025. Companies that benefit from a building boom include Caterpillar, which makes construction equipment, and Aecom, which builds the plants.

The factories of the future won’t resemble those from the 1950s—it would cost too much. A U.S. manufacturing worker makes about $30 dollars versus $3 an hour for a Mexican one. Nor are there Americans to fill all the jobs. McKinsey partner Liz Hempel says there is a shortage of 1.9 million manufacturing workers in the U.S., a gap that will have to be filled by robots. “Automation has to be part of the discussion,” she says.

All those factories will need power, too. U.S. electricity consumption was stagnant from 2000 to 2020, growing less than 0.3% a year on average. Then came electric vehicles, which shifted demand from the pump to the socket, heat pumps that use electricity to manage home temperatures instead of burning heating oil or natural gas, and power-hungry AI data centers, which could consume 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028. Since 2020, electricity demand has grown almost 2% a year and should exceed that every year for the rest of the decade. That should be a boon to companies along the power-line value chain, including Quanta Services, Prysmian, and Schneider Electric.

In the short term, worries about the strength of the U.S. economy could overwhelm these tailwinds. After all, the industrial economy has struggled over the past two years, even with electrification, reshoring, and automation. The Institute for Supply Management Purchasing Managers’ Index was below 50, indicating shrinking activity, for 26 consecutive months heading into 2025, before shifting to growth with two 50-plus readings in January and February. Now, tariffs and other policy uncertainties threaten to end the recovery just as it begins. It’s still possible that a slowdown, if one occurs, will be short-lived. The manufacturing sector could prosper thanks to the shift in government focus even as other parts of the economy struggle.

Exchange-traded funds that track the industrial sector would be one way to bet on an American manufacturing renaissance, though none is perfect. The $1.6 billion iShares U.S. Industrials ETF, for instance, holds 191 stocks, but its two largest positions are Visa and Mastercard. The $3.1 billion First Trust RBA American Industrial Renaissance ETF holds 52 small- and mid-cap stocks, including RBC Bearings and MasTec, but misses out on the larger stocks. Launched in 2024, the iShares U.S. Manufacturing ETF, with its large stakes in Deere and Honeywell International as well auto makers—which are technically consumer-discretionary companies—such as General Motors, better reflects the theme. Unfortunately, it has less than $13 million in assets under management, which might be too small for most investors.

Ultimately, the $20 billion Industrial Select Sector SPDR ETF, which offers market-weighted exposure to the group, or the $5.3 billion Vanguard Industrials ETF, which tracks the industrial stocks in the MSCI US index and includes everything from microcaps to large-caps, could be the best bet.

Five individual stocks stand out for their exposure to America’s manufacturing renaissance. In construction, there’s CRH, which has turned itself into one of the world’s largest building-materials and construction companies. It produces aggregates—stone used to make concrete—as well as cement, asphalt, and other construction-related products, and builds roads and infrastructure. Though it’s based in Dublin, it gets 61% of its revenue from the U.S. Its vertically integrated business model “enables the company to profit from the entire value chain,” says Truist Securities analyst Keith Hughes.

Hughes rates shares a Buy and has a $120 price target for the stock, up 22% from a recent $98.76. His price target values CRH shares at about 12 times estimated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, which doesn’t look expensive considering the company has grown that metric by about 10% a year on average for the past five years. Growth should continue due to a combination of industry strength and targeted acquisitions; CRH has completed more than 800 acquisitions.

The automation of factories will benefit Rockwell Automation, a Milwaukee-based specialist in the automation and digital transformation of manufacturing processes. Rockwell stock hasn’t kept pace with the broader market over the past few years, as earnings growth stagnated as manufacturing slowed. But profits look set to accelerate again. The company beat earnings forecasts when it reported fiscal first-quarter results in February, leading Oppenheimer analyst Noah Kaye to observe that demand is “inflecting.”

Wall Street seems to agree: It is projecting average annual earnings growth of about 17% for the coming two years. Those numbers could be even better if “demand for automation begins to outpace the broader economy again,” writes Kaye, who has a $320 price target on Rockwell, up 23% from a recent $260.03.

Like Rockwell, Ametek, which makes a broad range of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices for a host of industries, is also a beneficiary of automation. The company is expected to grow earnings at about 10% a year on average for the next few years, and with an added boost from improving U.S. manufacturing, growth could be faster than expected. That makes the stock worth a look even at 25 times 2025 earnings estimates, a premium to the S&P 500 ’s 21 times. “Ametek is a good management team with broad exposure to capital spending trends,” says Obin, who has a Buy rating and a $225 price target on the stock, up 27% from recent levels.

GE Vernova, which builds turbines, wind generators, and other products needed to produce and distribute electricity, should benefit as power demand grows. The stock has dropped 20% since Jan. 27, when China’s DeepSeek caused all stocks related to the AI trade to tumble on concerns that the technology didn’t have to be quite so power-hungry.

The selloff looks like an opportunity. Shares trade for about 27 times estimated 2026 earnings before Ebitda, more expensive than the typical industrial stocks in the S&P 500, which trade for closer to 15 times 2026 Ebitda. GE Vernova, however, is expected to grow its Ebitda by almost 50% between 2025 and 2026. That number for industrial companies in the S&P 500 is closer to 10%.

BofA’s Obin points out that before GE ran into serious trouble a few years ago, Wall Street valued its power assets at about $80 billion. Stock volatility and multiples aside, investors have bid Vernova back close to those levels. He sees more upside given rising demand, rating shares Buy with a $485 price target for the stock, up 44% from a recent $335.80.

Like GE Vernova, Eaton benefits directly from accelerating demand for electricity. But rather than making the turbines that turn natural gas into electricity, it makes the hardware and software that help electricity move from a regional substation to a home, factory, or data center. Its shares have dropped 21% since peaking at $371 in January on those same DeepSeek fears.

It looks like a dip to buy. At an analyst and investor day in March, Eaton said it plans to grow sales by 6% to 9% annually until 2030 while expanding profit margins by about four percentage points, from almost 20% in 2024. That adds up to earnings growth of greater than 12% annually, with additional upside from mergers and acquisitions. After the event, KeyBanc analyst Jeffrey Hammond upgraded Eaton stock to Buy from Hold and established a $340 price target, up 15% from a recent $294.56.

It pays to stick with solid businesses. Eaton shares have returned 19% a year for the past 10 years, six percentage points better than the S&P 500. It’s one stock that doesn’t need to be made great again. It’s already there.

Incyte’s quest for its next big thing ended in disappointment— and a stock tumble —this past week. Unfortunately, the problems go well beyond the recent selloff or the latest trial, as long-term investors in the biotech know all too well.

Incyte tumbled more than 8% earlier this week after disappointing Phase 3 study results for povorcitinib, a drug that targets severe hidradenitis suppurativa (HS). Strong Phase 2 data had lifted hopes for the treatment for the condition that causes chronic boils and abscesses under the skin, but the final results were less promising than the prior study in terms of efficacy and perceived competitive positioning.

That doesn’t mean the drug won’t get approved, but it likely means it won’t be a blockbuster. RBC Capital Markets analyst Brian Abrahams warned after the results that sales will almost certainly miss the expected $1 billion mark. Another analyst, Truist Securities’ Srikripa Devarakonda, noted that HS is a disease that tends to cause variable symptoms in people that respond differently to treatment. As a result, patients tend to try different medications to treat it, dimming its prospects. Povorcitinib is being tested as an anti-inflammatory for other uses, but Devarakonda warns that it will “take time for the full potential to be realized.”

Povorcitinib is a JAK1 inhibitor, blocking a kind of enzyme called a protein kinase that regulates processes in the cell. That puts it apart from other anti-inflammatory biologics that instead target immune cell proteins called cytokines.

The latest trial data means that it’s less likely that povorcitinib will take a bigger portion of the JAK market. And although the company has “other intriguing early programs” in its pipeline, Guggenheim’s Michael Schmidt downgraded the stock to Neutral from Buy on the news, as he believes “the stock will be range-bound as investors continue to take a ‘show me’ approach” to the company’s other up-and-coming drugs until there’s more hard data.

At 10.5 times forward earnings, Incyte looks undeniably cheap compared with its five-year average of 30 times, especially for a stock that’s expected to see earnings per share rebound strongly this year before climbing 15% in 2026.

The bigger problem for long-term investors is that those fundamentals have mattered little to Incyte in recent years, as has often been the case for biotechs. For an industry where the main question is always, “What’s next?” it’s often hard to find a satisfying answer. For Incyte, the fact that estimates have come down this past week—and may continue to be revised lower—only exacerbate the problem.

Airline Stocks Are Burning Investors. It’s Not the First Time.

Over the past decade, when the S&P 500 has risen 175%, Incyte has fallen by a third. The SPDR S&P Biotech and iShares Biotechnology exchange-traded funds have hardly kept pace with the broader market either, but at least both are in positive territory, up around 15% over the period. The same pattern plays out over the past three- and five-year periods too.

Even true blockbusters often don’t translate into sustainable gains for biotechs. HIV and hepatitis C pioneer Gilead Sciences is one of the poster children for this: It too has badly lagged behind the broader market over the past five and 10 years.

In short, Incyte’s problem isn’t just related to the recent data, and it’s not alone. Biotech’s underperformance is a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s not time to place big bets just yet.