The Secret Investor on growing with the hype

And what happened to an IM that had US growth as the upside...

Hello Rainmakers,

This is the latest monthly missive from the Secret Investor.

On Thursday we’ll be looking under the hood of a couple of recent developments in the M&A world, and on Friday we’ll have our usual round up from around the UK.

The news of the last few weeks has obviously been dominated by our friend Donald over the pond and every man and his dog has a view on him so I’ll spare you the hassle of reading about him here. I am sure there are better places to get your fix of daily lunacy to be honest…

In more local news, it was great to see the news that Palatine had closed its latest fund, with an impressive £254m raised into its 5^th buyout fund. Palatine have consistently overachieved since entering the market in the mid-noughties, and the longevity on display to raise that sum of money once again in an extremely challenging climate is astounding. Every credit!

On the deal front, we’ve seen a few notable completions. VibePay being acquired by Banked jumped out as a deal which I expected to gain a little more PR to be honest. I don’t know the ins and outs of the deal, but it certainly felt like a good fit and a nice home for the VibePay business and reading between the lines it didn’t feel like a sort of bailout deal in the same way as a the Peak AI deal might have appeared. Luke Massie joining the board of Banked would certainly support that view as well.

Fair play to Luke, he started off the journey as a sort of loud, brash, PR heavy young entrepreneur with a strong following but as far as I could see a pretty vague business model and no real strategy to monetise what he’d built.