Distribution Is the New Moat
Hi, and welcome to a new edition of The Daily Dealflow. Today’s edition marks an important milestone in my career, and it’s tied to the launch of Nomada Fund. You’ll find the rest of the details below. Thank you to all the friends and allies who have supported us in getting to this point.
🏆 Deal of the Day
Nomada Fund launched this week from Miami and San Francisco, and I’m proud to say it’s the world’s first New Media fund. We don’t invest cash. We invest Media Credits in sustained distribution across more than 10 platforms, including newsletters, podcasts, communities, events, SEO and GEO, in exchange for equity in Pre-seed and Seed startups from Latin America and the U.S. We’re backed by ILB Media Group, a conglomerate of more than 20 finance and investment outlets in both regions – PR Newswire.
Why This?: We call the model Distribution for Equity (D4E). It borrows from Media for Equity funds, but we swapped TV, radio and print for newsletters, podcasts and communities, and we come in at Pre-seed and Seed instead of at maturity. I’ve seen many founders who can build a product cheaply but can’t afford reach, and this gives them a different kind of currency. Read more here.
💰 Venture Capital
Submit a deal for The Daily Dealflow newsletter via DM here on LinkedIn.
Abby Care (US) – $82M, Series C, Chicago home-care platform that trains and certifies family members to become paid caregivers through state-sponsored programs. Transformation Capital led, with new investors CVS Health Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures and Pivotal Ventures (Melinda French Gates), and existing backers Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital returning. The platform is led by Havi Nguyen and operates in eight states, including Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. In other words, it turns "I take care of my mom" into a paycheck – FinSMEs.
Giraffe Bio (Argentina) – $6.4M, seed, biotech that uses AI to develop biochemical reagents that help mining companies recover more copper from ore. Orion Industrial Ventures led, with BHP Ventures, Twynam, AIR Capital and Baruch Future Ventures. Founders Alejandro Buffo Sempé and Juan Pablo Fernández started the company in 2024, it operates in Chile, and it is the first Latin American startup picked for Breakthrough Energy's Fellows program – LatamList.
Opsin (US) – $21M, funding round, San Jose governance and security platform for AI agents that shows enterprises what their agents can access and flags behavior that strays from its purpose. SYN Ventures and Race Capital led. Founders James Pham, Oz Wasserman and Jeremy Mailen serve nearly 20 customers in regulated industries, which makes this a nice companion to today's Deal of the Day – FinSMEs.
🏛️ Private Equity
L Catterton / Scanntech (Uruguay) – $180M, minority stake of about 30%, retail data technology company that collects sales data in real time so retailers and consumer goods companies can track prices, volumes, market share and promotions. L Catterton led, with Partners Group and Bradesco, and the round is split roughly equally between new capital and secondary share sales. Warburg Pincus, which invested $40M in 2023, sold part of its stake and stays on the cap table. Scanntech, founded in 1992, processes more than $200B in annual retail sales, grows about 30% a year and plans to enter new markets starting in 2027 – LatamList.
Proofpoint / Varonis Systems (US) – $6.3B, all-cash acquisition by a Thoma Bravo portfolio company, Miami-based data security software at $49.75 per share, a 52% premium to Varonis's June 22 close and about $5.71B in equity value. Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan agreed to invest in Proofpoint, which Thoma Bravo took private in 2021 in a deal valued at about $12.3B. Varonis CEO and co-founder Yaki Faitelson says "Our mission is to secure AI and the data that powers it," and closing is expected in the first half of 2027 – KSL (Reuters).
26North / MEI Industrial Solutions (US) – undisclosed price, buyout from Olympus Partners. 26North, founded in 2022 by Josh Harris and managing about $38B, signed a definitive agreement to buy the Dallas company, which rigs, moves, stores and crates heavy equipment for data centers, semiconductor plants and aerospace customers. MEI has 30 locations, about 2,500 employees and roughly 10M square feet of storage. Think of it as the moving company for transformers headed to AI campuses. Closing is expected in Q4 2026 – Business Wire.
📈 Public & Capital Markets
CoreWeave (US, Nasdaq) – debt concerns, AI cloud infrastructure. The company rents Nvidia-powered computing capacity to customers such as OpenAI and Microsoft and carries roughly $50B of debt. Its 2032 bonds fell to about 78 cents on the dollar, and credit-default swap pricing implies about a 63% chance of default within five years. Co-founder Brannin McBee told the Financial Times the company hopes to earn an investment-grade rating eventually – Brew Markets.
Bending Spoons, Twilio, Fastly, CoreWeave, Tesla and Netflix (Nasdaq, NYSE) – stock movers. Bending Spoons fell 14.86% midday, Twilio 12.59%, Fastly 12.11% and CoreWeave 11.82%. Tesla rose 3.30% premarket after its Roadster reveal, and Netflix fell 3.51% after naming a new chief content officer following layoffs. Bending Spoons, the Milan-based owner of Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer and AOL, priced its Nasdaq IPO at $29 a share in July, raising $1.68B – TheStreet and AI Weekly.
Lyft (US, Nasdaq) – company update, ride-hailing. CEO David Risher announced Alcove, a luxury chauffeur service for executives and VIPs launching in early 2027, built on Lyft's $110M purchase of TBR Global Chauffeuring. Lyft's stock is down 11.41% this year, and Risher thinks Alcove could eventually become a multibillion-dollar business – Brew Markets.
📅 ICYMI
An AI agent reportedly deleted an entire season of the Swedish reality show "The Challenge Sverige" weeks before its premiere. The network blamed a "technical breakdown," and the release is pushed to 2027.
Colossal Biosciences launched GenoMorph, an AI platform that analyzes genetic and developmental data from living birds to find the DNA edits that could recreate the extinct dodo – TechCrunch.
A Harvard survey of more than 5,400 Americans found that 53% of men claimed to recognize two fictional AI executives, and men were much less likely than women to answer "not sure." Both groups answered incorrectly at about the same rate – Wired.
See you tomorrow,
Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society