General Atlantic and Mubadala Send Positive Signals About Market

The stock market is setting records, partly due to enthusiasm about artificial intelligence, a sector where valuations have soared. The IPO market isn’t back to where it was before interest rates started rising. Yet some investors are more upbeat about investment conditions than they’ve been in a while, judging from comments at our Private Capital Conference in New York on Tuesday. Anton Levy, of General Atlantic, for instance, said, “For the first time in a little while, prices…are fair,” particularly in enterprise software and e-commerce. “It’s a great environment to put new capital to work.” (To be clear, he also acknowledged that “exuberance” was affecting prices in some sectors, such as AI.)

In the same vein, Ibrahim Ajami, venture head of Mubadala Capital, said, “We are moving to offense.” The past three years, as the market peaked and then crashed during the 2022 correction, gave Mubadala—a sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates—time to reevaluate. Ajami called that period a “reset” time. Mubadala is coming out of that with a different approach. In the future, he signaled, Mubadala plans to pursue deeper relationships with founders and more concentrated positions than in the past. For more, see here.