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The power producer agreed to buy Calpine this past week for $16.4 billion and has become an industry darling amid surging electricity demand

Three years ago Constellation Energy CEG 25.16%increase; green up pointing triangle was spun out of the utility Exelon, hived off as an unwanted company running nuclear power plants that might close.

This past week, Constellation’s stock hit a record high, and it signed one of the power industry’s largest acquisitions.

Constellation, the country’s biggest producer of nuclear power, agreed to buy the private-equity-owned Calpine, a major generator of natural gas-fired and geothermal power for $16.4 billion, plus debt. Shares rose 25% on Friday, and it was the second-best performer in the S&P 500 that day.

It is part of a remarkable turnaround for Constellation, Calpine and other power producers, which have emerged from years of ho-hum electricity demand as the newly popular kids. Constellation’s stock has risen roughly 575% since the spinout.

The industry’s glow is due in large part to the boom in demand for electricity-hungry artificial-intelligence computing. That trend has sent the wealthy tech sector on a desperate hunt for city-sized amounts of power for new data centers.

Tech companies have preferred wind, solar or nuclear power because they avoid carbon emissions. But in practical terms, power demand is rising so quickly that companies can’t be picky. For now, sustainability commitments are taking a back seat to tech companies’ desire to rapidly build data centers, according to analysts.

The deal for Calpine, and its fleet of natural-gas plants, is a shift for Constellation, which investors have viewed as a bet on nuclear power’s future in the U.S. Constellation Chief Executive Joe Dominguez says tech companies and others are running out of carbon-free power options.

“They’re going to have to use some natural gas, and we want to be able to participate in that,” Dominguez said.

Nuclear renaissance

In 2022, Exelon was among several utilities selling competitive generation businesses. Constellation’s pitch to investors and lawmakers was that the country would increasingly need nuclear’s reliable and carbon-free generation.

While nuclear plants provide a reliable backbone to electric grids across the country, many had folded under competitive pressures from natural gas and renewables. Several states had stepped in with tax credits or other forms of support to halt closures.

Within weeks of the spinout, Russia invaded Ukraine, which sent natural-gas prices higher and prompted a rethink of global energy security, including the value of nuclear plants.

In August 2022, federal tax credits for nuclear power were approved under the Inflation Reduction Act, giving generators like Constellation a price floor to ensure that plants could stay open. Constellation has since notched improvements to its credit rating, too, which was earlier considered almost speculative.

Last September, Constellation and Microsoft signed a high-profile deal to restart the undamaged reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, the site of the nation’s biggest civilian power accident. Constellation also plans license extensions at existing plants and “upratings” to produce more nuclear power at existing reactors.

There are a limited number of such projects, though, and building new nuclear plants will be costly and time-consuming.

Small modular reactors, which developers say could be delivered faster and cheaper than conventional nuclear plants, have created a lot of excitement but aren’t yet available. Other new, clean and reliable technologies are in early stages, too.

“New nuclear is a good bit away in our estimation,” Dominguez said. “We believe gas is going to be part of the solution set for businesses for at least the next couple of decades and quite honestly probably more. We’ve understood that for a while, and so we don’t think of this as a pivot.”

Natural-gas needs

When private-equity firm Energy Capital Partners and a group of co-investors agreed to take Calpine private in 2017, Tyler Reeder, president and managing partner of ECP, said the purchase was “a little bit contrarian.”

“We would hear a frequent question around gas-fired assets, questions around obsolescence or how much longer we would need these assets,” Reeder said. “In some markets I think it was overstated that these assets wouldn’t be needed five or 10 years out. We had a very different view.”

ECP liked Calpine’s geothermal assets, including The Geysers complex with 13 plants in northern California. It has also developed large battery-storage and solar projects.

In the past year, the consensus on how much natural gas will be needed has increased sharply with electricity demand forecasts.

Discussions between Constellation and Calpine leaders had been going on for about two years, though they picked up last fall, Dominguez said.

ECP and its partners have agreed to hold Constellation shares for 18 months. Reeder said it allows them to start an exit but stay invested in the idea that a combined company can meet the wave of data-center demand. “We just believe in it. We’re not in any way running for the door here,” Reeder said.

The addition of natural gas-fired plants will expose Constellation to more commodity price risk, said Scott Wilmot, analyst at Enverus Intelligence Research.

The companies will need approvals for the deal from federal and state regulators, too.

“Given the increased political and overall attention on power demand, we would expect a protracted process and likely opposition from stakeholders, including regulated utilities,” analysts at Jefferies said.

Constellation said it could sell some assets in markets that overlap with Calpine, especially in the PJM Interconnection, the regional transmission organization and electricity market serving Washington, D.C., and all or part of 13 states.

JPMorgan event follows the murder of an industry leader and the nomination of a vaccine sceptic as top official

Healthcare executives, dealmakers and investors will gather in San Francisco this coming week at a tumultuous moment for the industry following the murder of a top executive and Donald Trump’s nomination of a vaccine sceptic as the top US health official.

“We’re entering San Francisco this year with a higher level of uncertainty than we have in the past, largely because some of the policy unknowns,” said John Maraganore, the former chief executive of $30bn biotech Alnylam Pharmaceuticals who now advises boutique bank Jefferies and venture capital firm Arch Venture Partners.

About 8,000 people are expected to attend the JPMorgan healthcare conference in San Francisco’s Union Square. In total more than 60,000 people will travel to the city for the event, which is typically a magnet for biotech deals.

Over the past year, the SPDR S&P Pharmaceuticals ETF, which groups together large-cap pharmaceutical stocks, was flat, while the wider S&P 500 index was up nearly 22 per cent.

The nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has spread conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine and criticised blockbuster weight-loss drugs, to run the health department as well as several of his allies to run its powerful agencies has injected extra uncertainty.

The security presence at the conference has been significantly bolstered following the murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan in November in what prosecutors alleged was “an act of terrorism” waged against the healthcare industry by 26-year-old Ivy League graduate Luigi Mangione.

“Everyone’s on higher alert this year, but I’m not going to do anything different than pay more attention to what my security team tells me I can and can’t do,” said Brent Saunders, the chief executive of eyecare company Bausch + Lomb.

Saunders said policy uncertainty had been “like a cold bucket of water on the sector”. But he added that “I’ve lived through several administrative changes as a CEO and you tend to not get too worried about it.”

Several managed care companies will not be in attendance this year, but people close to them stressed that their absence was unrelated to security concerns. UnitedHealth never attends, CVS pulled out after the departure of its chief executive in October and Cigna will also not attend, according to people familiar with the matter.

Local police officers’ leave has been cancelled to ensure the San Francisco Police Department has sufficient resources for the event, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Kosta Kleyman, a healthcare investor at investment manager Columbia Threadneedle, pointed out that the discontent towards health insurers that emerged in the aftermath of Thompson’s killing had created a “negative sentiment” around insurer stocks and a sell-off at the end of last year as investors fretted over policy changes.

Despite the uncertainty, Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of $10bn biotech venture capital fund RA Capital, said he was bullish about the outlook for the sector. “I think that medicine in America operates with a lot of checks and balances and can handle ideological shifts.”

“All people want medicines that really work,” added Kolchinsky. “For example, outbreaks among the unvaccinated remind the rest of us that life is better with vaccines. Ideology isn’t everything.”

Fred Hassan, the former chief executive of Schering-Plough who now advises private equity group Warburg Pincus, said: “There’s a lot of good science that got started in the 2021-22 period and is struggling to get funded, so hopefully at JPMorgan, we are going to hear some good news about the sector loosening up.”

In a sign that brighter days may be ahead, there were already glimmers of hope over the weekend that big drugmakers were beginning to spend on mergers and acquisitions, either to resolve patent cliffs or to diversify their pipeline. Both GSK and Eli Lilly were in late-stage talks to acquire cancer-focused biotechs, the Financial Times reported, while Biogen made a nearly $500mn unsolicited bid for depression drugmaker Sage Therapeutics.

• Trump has repeatedly declared that controlling Greenland — the world's largest island — is necessary for U.S. national security vis-a-vis Russia and China. His son Don Jr. visited Greenland this week bearing MAGA hats.
• Climate change is opening up the Arctic for competition between superpowers, and could also make it easier to tap Greenland's mineral riches.
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• One European diplomat told Axios that Denmark is widely seen as one of the closest allies of the U.S. within the EU, and no one could have imagined it would be the first country with which Trump would pick a fight.

• In a press conference after the meeting Frederiksen said she asked for a meeting with Trump. Egede said he is also ready to talk to the president-elect.
• "Greenland is for the Greenlandic people. We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American. We want to be Greenlandic," Egede, an advocate for independence, said at the press conference.

• In the messages passed to the Trump team, the Danish government made clear Greenland was not for sale but expressed readiness to discuss any other U.S. request regarding the island, the sources said.
• The U.S. already has a military base on Greenland and an agreement with Denmark dating to 1951 on defending the island, under which an increase of U.S. forces could easily be discussed.

• Danish officials have already said they are looking into further measures to increase investment in military infrastructure and capabilities in Greenland, in consultation with the Greenlandic government.

• With new sea lanes opening up as climate change reshapes the Arctic, Greenland's geography is becoming all the more important.
• But if Trump's real concern is security, there's no reason the U.S. couldn't simply increase its military presence and capabilities in Greenland under its alliance with Denmark, contends Malte Humpert, a founder and senior fellow at the Arctic Institute.

• But Trump's continued comments about this issue, and his son's visit, mean Danish and Greenlandic officials can't rule out the possibility that Trump is quite serious.

Nvidia’s AI empire: A look at its top startup investments

No company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. Its revenue, profitability, and cash reserves have skyrocketed since the introduction of ChatGPT a little over two years ago — and the many competitive generative AI services that have launched since. And its stock price soared more than eightfold.

During that period, the world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.

The chip giant ramped up its venture capital activity in 2024, participating in 49 funding rounds for AI companies, a sharp increase from 34 in 2023, according to PitchBook data. It’s a dramatic surge in investment compared to the previous four years combined, during which Nvidia funded only 38 AI deals. Note that these investments exclude those made by its formal corporate VC fund, NVentures, which also significantly ramped up its investing in the last two years. (PitchBook says NVentures engaged in 24 deals in 2024, compared to just 2 in 2022.)

Nvidia has stated that the goal of its corporate investing is to expand the AI ecosystem by backing startups it considers to be “game changers and market makers.”

Of course, Nvidia is not the only large tech corporation writing checks to AI startups. But over the last two years, it was the most active. Compared to Nvidia’s 83 deals in two years (2023 and 2024), Alphabet participated in 73, while Microsoft has done 40 rounds, PitchBook data shows.

Below is a list of startups that raised rounds exceeding $100 million over the past two years where Nvidia is a named participant, organized from the highest amount to lowest raised in the round.

OpenAI: Nvidia backed the ChatGPT maker for the first time in October, reportedly writing a $100 million check toward a colossal $6.6 billion round that valued the company at $157 billion. The chipmaker’s investment was dwarfed by OpenAI’s other backers, notably Thrive, which according to the New York Times invested $1.3 billion.

xAI: Nvidia participated in the $6 billion round of Elon Musk’s xAI. The deal revealed that not all of OpenAI’s investors followed its request to refrain from backing any of its direct competitors. After investing in the ChatGPT maker in October, Nvidia joined xAI’s cap table a few months later.

Inflection: One of Nvidia’s first significant AI investments also had one of the most unusual outcomes. In June 2023, Nvidia was one of several lead investors in Inflection’s $1.3 billion round, a company founded by Mustafa Suleyman, who earlier founded DeepMind. Less than a year later, Microsoft hired Inflection AI’s founders, paying $620 million for a non-exclusive technology license, leaving the company with a significantly diminished workforce and a less defined future.

Wayve: In May, Nvidia participated in a $1.05 billion round for the U.K.-based startup, which is developing a self-learning system for autonomous driving. The company is testing its vehicles in the U.K. and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Safe Superintelligence: In September, Nvidia was a backer in the new startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. The $1 billion round reportedly valued the new 10-person AI lab at $5 billion.

Scale AI: In May 2024, Nvidia joined Accel and other tech giants Amazon and Meta to invest $1 billion in Scale AI, which provides data-labeling services to companies for training AI models. The round valued the San Francisco-based company at nearly $14 billion.

Crusoe: A startup building data centers reportedly to be leased to Oracle, Microsoft, and OpenAI raised $686 million in late November, according to an SEC filing. The investment was led by Founders Fund, and the long list of other investors included Nvidia.

Figure AI: In February, AI robotics startup Figure raised a $675 million Series B from Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Microsoft, and others. The round valued the company at $2.6 billion.

Mistral AI: Nvidia invested in Mistral for the second time when the French-based large language model developer raised a $640 million Series B at a $6 billion valuation in June.

Cohere: In June, Nvidia invested in Cohere’s $500 million round, a large language model provider serving enterprises. The chipmaker first backed the Toronto-based startup a year prior.

Perplexity: Nvidia first invested in Perplexity in November of 2023 and has participated in every subsequent round of the AI search engine startup, including the $500 million round in December, which values the company at $9 billion, according to PitchBook data.

Poolside: In October, the AI coding assistant startup Poolside announced it raised $500 million led by Bain Capital Ventures. Nvidia participated in the round, which valued the AI startup at $3 billion.

CoreWeave: Nvidia invested in the AI cloud computing provider in April 2023, when CoreWeave raised $221 million in funding. Since then, CoreWeave’s valuation has jumped from about $2 billion to $19 billion, and the company reportedly has its sights on a $35 billion IPO this year. CoreWeave allows its customers to rent Nvidia GPUs on an hourly basis.

Sakana AI: In September, Nvidia invested in the Japan-based startup, which trains low-cost generative AI models using small datasets. The startup raised a massive Series A round of about $214 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Imbue: The AI research lab that claims to be developing AI systems that can reason and code raised a $200 million round in September 2023 from investors, including Nvidia, Astera Institute, and former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt.

Waabi: In June, the autonomous trucking startup raised a $200 million Series B round co-led by existing investors Uber and Khosla Ventures. Other investors included Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobil Holding SE.

Ayar Labs: In December, Nvidia invested in the $155 million round of Ayar Labs, a company developing optical interconnects to improve AI compute and power efficiency. This was the third time Nvidia backed the startup.

Kore.ai: The startup developing enterprise-focused AI chatbots raised $150 million in December of 2023. In addition to Nvidia, investors participating in the funding included FTV Capital, Vistara Growth, and Sweetwater Private Equity.

Weka: In May, Nvidia invested in a $140 million round for AI-native data management platform Weka. The round valued the Silicon Valley company at $1.6 billion.

Runway: In June of 2023, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, raised a $141 million Series C extension from investors, including Nvidia, Google, and Salesforce.

Bright Machines: In June 2024, Nvidia participated in a $126 million Series C of Bright Machines, a smart robotics and AI-driven software startup.

Vast Data: The startup that provides storage solutions for AI and data analytics raised a $118 million Series E at a $9.3 billion valuation in December of 2023. That was the third time Nvidia invested in Vast Data.

Enfabrica: In September 2023, Nvidia invested in networking chips designer Enfabrica’s $125 million Series B. Although the startup raised another $115 million in November, Nvidia didn’t participate in the round.

Opposition leader has capitalised on anti-Trudeau sentiment while attracting Trump supporters across the border

Pierre Poilievre has long known what he would do if elected Canada’s Prime Minister.

As a 20-year-old in 1999, he won a $10,000 prize for an essay on the topic of “As Prime Minister I would . . . ” in which he warned that “Canadian political institutions have caused our democracy to wither”, and argued for personal freedoms and wholesale tax reform.

A quarter of a century later Poilievre is closer to putting that populist vision into action after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to leave office after nearly a decade in power.

“We’ll cap spending, axe taxes, reward work, build homes, uphold family, stop crime, secure borders, rearm our forces, restore our freedom and put Canada First,” the Conservative party leader said after Trudeau’s resignation speech on Monday.

While there are still several months to go before an election will take place, the Conservative leader has a comfortable 27 per cent lead in the polls, leaving him in a strong position ahead of a spring campaign.

His views have also caught the attention of president-elect Donald Trump’s supporters south of the border in the US.

Bill Ackman, the Trump-backing billionaire hedge fund manager in December posted on X that Poilievre should be the next prime minister, “the sooner the better”.

Like Trump, Poilievre has embraced Conservative male podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, who amplify his “common sense” message to millions of listeners around the world.

X owner and billionaire Elon Musk, who repeatedly mocks Trudeau, regularly tweets his support for Poilievre, while Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcast host, said last year the opposition leader “makes so much more sense”.

In a recent podcast interview, Poilievre told Peterson that “the problem we’ve had in this country, and all the countries affected by this horrendous, utopian wokeism, is that it has been focused on the grandiosity of the leadership . . . and not the things that are grand and great about the common people”. 

Poilievre won the Conservative leadership in 2022 after years as a minister in former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which was in power from 2006 to 2015.

He has united the party and moved it further to the right, promising to reverse the progressive liberal agenda of the Trudeau government. He is fond of pithy pledges to “axe the tax” — or ditch a controversial carbon levy — and “jail, not bail” — imposing tougher sentences for criminals. He wants to defund the CBC, the publicly funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Like Trump to the south, Poilievre believes energy — both renewable and fossil fuels — can create jobs and rescue the economy. But he also argues Canada’s abundance of oil is “underpriced’ and underulitilised in geopolitics because there is only one pipeline that does not head straight to the US.  

Trump should approve the controversial Keystone XL, now mothballed, that could pump nearly 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta’s oil sands region, he said.

Canadians’ frustration with the Trudeau government over their stagnating economy has offered a rich seam to exploit. Inflation soared to 7 per cent in 2022 — although it has now returned to the bank of Canada’s 2 per cent range — and unemployment is about 7 per cent.

The country would be in recession if not for population growth through immigration policies that Trudeau was forced to reverse after a public backlash.

In March 2024, there were more than 2mn visits to food banks in Canada — the highest number in history — a 90 per cent increase compared with 2019, according to the NGO Food Banks Canada.

Dan Nowlan, a former senior aide in the Harper government, said Poilievre had excelled at connecting with Canadians who are feeling worse off.

“What Poilievre says resonates. He talks like he’s been in a hockey rink. He comes across as a normal person. Trudeau is from another universe that Canadians just don’t identify with,” he said.

This difference was seen in early 2022 when Trudeau and his government invoked unprecedented emergency powers to crack down on so-called “Freedom Convoys” protesting against mandatory pandemic measures such as vaccines.

Poilievre seized the opportunity to support the protesters and criticise the government as elitist and out of touch with ordinary Canadians.

His plain speaking image is bolstered by his background. Unlike Trudeau, who comes from a Canadian political dynasty (his father Pierre served two terms as prime minister from 1968 to 1979, and 1980-84), Poilievre was adopted by two schoolteachers from a French speaking minority in the western province of Alberta.

Ginny Roth, who ran Poilievre’s leadership campaign communications strategy, said he is “fearless” and uses “straight talk, cutting past the bullshit” that Canadians crave.

“He focused on inflation before anyone else, started fighting the Nimbys before anyone else, and realised the carbon tax wasn’t a settled debate, all big winner issues for him,” she said.

But comparisons with Trump’s Maga movement only go so far. Poilievre supports immigration and multiculturalism and claims to be against corporate interests. He argues his agenda is not extreme but a response to Trudeau’s “radical extreme socialist policies” that divided and broke the country.

He has also distanced himself from Trump since the president-elect said the US should annex Canada.

“Canada will never be the 51st state. Period,” Poilievre said on Tuesday.

And while Poilievre is ahead in the polls and is predicted to be the winner in the next election, he does not inspire the same enthusiasm as Trump.

“There is no Poilievre mania in Canada,” said David Coletto, chief executive of Abacus Data. “Young men are Poilievre’s number 1 fan base. Hence why the interview with Jordan Peterson,” he said.

“He’s the only federal leader which more people like than dislike.”

It certainly was a big week — with companies having to raise more than $100 million to make the list. Biotech- and healthcare-related startups led the way — as those companies dominate the list, taking a vast majority of spots. However, as usual, a company with AI ties is on top.

1. DDN, $300M, data storage: Data is the big-money game right now. Private equity giant Blackstone Group is making a $300 million strategic investment into DDN, valuing the Chatsworth, California-based data storage company at $5 billion. Founded in 1998, DDN — formerly called DataDirect Networks — helps companies store, analyze and manage data — a value commodity as more businesses look to create and train AI models. The company plans to use the new cash to expand in industries ranging from healthcare to autonomous vehicles and accelerate product innovation, including for its AI data intelligence platform. Of course this is far from the only play the Blackstone Group has made in the data sector. Last year it was reported the world’s largest asset manager plans to invest $8.2 billion to develop data centers in Spain. In 2023, it partnered with Digital Realty to develop $7 billion in data centers targeting providers of online content, cloud services and artificial intelligence. Blackstone also is a backer of CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure startup that gives access to highly sought-after AI chips from Nvidia.

2. Innovaccer, $275M, healthcare: San Francisco-based Innovaccer could be listed as artificial intelligence or health care, as the company is looking to be the “one stop shop” for healthcare AI solutions. Innovaccer — which helps healthcare organizations by providing software solutions that aim to improve patient experience and reduce the administrative burden on providers — raised a $275 million round that was a combination of primary and secondary. No lead investor was announced, but investors included B Capital and Kaiser Permanente. Founded in 2014, the company has raised $654 million, per Crunchbase.

3. Whatnot, $265M, e-commerce: While most of us are looking to cut back on our spending after the holidays, investors clearly think people want to spend more money on livestream shopping platform Whatnot. The Los Angeles-based startup raised a $265 million Series E at a valuation of nearly $5 billion. The round was co-led by Avra, DST Global and Greycroft. Whatnot’s annual gross merchandise value for livestream sales surpassed $3 billion last year. Founded in 2019, Whatnot has raised approximately $746 million, per the company.

4. Aviceda Therapeutics, $208M, biotech: It may be a new year, but biotech is still raising big. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Aviceda Therapeutics, a biotech company focused on developing immunomodulators to alleviate chronic inflammation, announced the closing of a $207.5 million Series C co-led by Omega Funds and TCGX. Founded in 2018, the company has raised $277 million, per Crunchbase.

5. Tenvie Therapeutics, $200M, biotech: South San Francisco-based Tenvie Therapeutics, a biotech looking into treatments of neurological diseases, launched with $200 million in funding led by Arch Venture Partners, F-Prime Capital and Mubadala Capital.

6. Timberlyne Therapeutics, $180M, biotech: San Diego-based Timberlyne Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical startup focused on the development of therapies for autoimmune disorders, closed a $180 million Series A led by Abingworth, Bain Capital Life Sciences and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners. This is the company’s first funding, per Crunchbase.

7. Inari, $144M, agtech: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Inari, a startup that designs more sustainable seeds for agriculture, locked up a $144 million round. No lead investor was named, but the company did say one of the new investors is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The company is focused on creating new seeds for large-acre crops with its first wave of products — which includes soybeans, corn and wheat. Founded in 2016, Inari has raised $720 million, per the company.

8. Hippocratic AI, $141M, artificial intelligence: Palo Alto, California-based Hippocratic AI, which develops a safety-focused large language model for healthcare, safety and accuracy, raised a $141 million Series B valuing the company at $1.6 billion. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins. Founded in 2023, the company has raised $276 million, per Crunchbase.

9. Evergreen Nephrology, $130M, healthcare: Nashville, Tennessee-based Evergreen Nephrology, which provides care to those suffering from chronic kidney disease, raised a $130 million round led by Oak HC/FT, Rubicon Founders and a group of existing investors. Founded in 2021, the company has raised $134 million, per Crunchbase.

10. Ouro Medicines, $120M, biotech: San Francisco-based Ouro Medicines, a biotech developing immune reset therapeutics for people living with chronic immune-mediated diseases, launched with a $120 million Series A co-led by New Enterprise Associates, Norwest Venture Partners and TPG.

The biggest funding outside the U.S. went, of course, to another biotech firm.

Exotic animals from a leopard tortoise to a sea lion have moved in and out of 70-year-old’s life, but falcons never left

WASHINGTON—When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gathered his 2024 presidential campaign team for a meeting, he elbowed his neighbor to point at the window: several falcons were flying through the air.

Long before he was a vaccine skeptic, presidential candidate and president-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department, Kennedy got hooked on falconry. The sport, in which wild birds of prey are trained to hunt with their handlers, hasn’t let go.

So central is falconry to Kennedy’s identity that a ballot access lawsuit last year challenging his claim that he lived in New York involved a debate over whether he had a valid falconry license in California.

Kennedy argued that while his three dogs and an emu moved to the Malibu home he shared with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, his roughly 20 hawks and falcons stayed in New York. Kennedy, 70, said his life in California was temporary and suggested someone else had signed the license application on his behalf.

Opposing lawyers showed a social media clip of ravens he was teaching to eat out of his hand on the balcony of his California abode.

“I trained them to come when I called them and also to talk and also to do certain tricks—mainly take like a poker chip and put it in somebody’s pocket,” Kennedy said in court of his history training the birds. Ravens, he noted, after a year or so of training can “talk like a parrot.”

The judge sided against Kennedy, finding his “testimony that he may return to that [New York] bedroom to reside with his wife, family members, multiple pets, and all of his personal belongings to be highly improbable, if not preposterous.”

Kennedy has courted controversy before with his exotic animals. He famously said he left a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, noting he had initially planned to keep the meat in his fridge.

“The Bear, The Penguin, Baby Reindeer. These are not just things found in R.F.K.’s freezer,” comedian Nikki Glaser said, referring to television shows at the Golden Globes awards ceremony this month.

Kennedy kept a coatimundi, a member of the raccoon family, in the basement playroom of his childhood house, until it assaulted his pregnant mother, sending her into premature labor, he wrote in his memoir “American Values.”

After a trip to East Africa in 1964, Kennedy wrote that he brought home a 16-pound leopard tortoise named Carruthers in a Gucci suitcase lent to him by his mother “which could not be used thereafter.”

The family briefly kept a California sea lion named Sandy in its pool, though Kennedy wrote Sandy would ride in the car with his mother for school pickups. After Sandy started roving with the family dogs and caused a “rush-hour traffic jam” in McLean, Va., the sea lion was donated to the zoo.

Kennedy found his true passion at the age of 11, when he read T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” a retelling of King Arthur’s adventures, including with a goshawk, a large hawk. Kennedy found a local falconer, Alva Nye, an aircraft acquisition specialist for the Defense Department, to teach him the fundamentals. Nye instructed Kennedy not only how to hunt with raptors but also how to care for them, said his son, Geoff Nye.

“It’s not like having a cat or a dog, I’ll tell you that,” Nye said. “They require very careful management of their health.”

“There’s not been any time in my life really since then that I haven’t had birds and haven’t been involved in the sport,” Kennedy said in a video posted to Instagram last year. “It’s kind of like being allowed to hunt with a wolf pack—if the wolves would actually allow you to go out with them.”

His bird bible was Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s manual on falconry, written shortly before 1250, that enumerated the life skills a falconer should possess, including nimbleness, a daring spirit, an imperviousness to hunger, heat and cold, a tendency to sleep lightly “so as to hear his falcon bells” and a strict prohibition against laziness. “These became my blueprints for living,” Kennedy wrote in his memoir.

As a child, Kennedy said he watched for peregrine falcons at the Justice Department, where his father, Robert Kennedy, worked as the Attorney General, and the White House, when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president. (The nest remains at the nearby Waldorf Astoria, a Hilton spokeswoman said.)

“He has a very intense appreciation for the natural world and this is just an extension of that,” said Steve Layman, a longtime falconer who has gone hawking, the term used for hunting with wild raptors, with Kennedy.

In the late 1980s, Kennedy wrote the New York state falconry study guide and exam manual.

As Kennedy turned to politics, he continued to draw on his falconry experience. Ahead of his 2024 presidential run, he met one of his senior campaign advisers at a falconry event he organized.

After endorsing Trump, Kennedy participated in a sweepstakes where winners could join him and Donald Trump Jr. for an October day of falcon hunting in the Hudson Valley. For $50,000, donors could also reserve their spot to “experience nature’s fiercest predators alongside two of America’s bravest personalities.”

Kennedy’s avian interests also extend to pigeons, which as a child, he said he would put on a train going to Delaware and time how long it took them to fly back to his home in Virginia. On boxer Mike Tyson’s podcast, he said that observing and interacting with birds never grows old for him.

“I could sit and watch pigeons for weeks and not get bored,” he said.