Can Helsing Become Europe’s Anduril? Inside Its $18B Valuation

**Aman Verjee** (0:00)
They are considered, I think, now the champion with this latest round and their revenue scale. They seem to be the biggest defense tech company in Europe.

**Kelly Rodriques** (0:07)
I think we are gonna see a resurgence of really great IPOs, but I think we're also gonna see the extended time of companies continuing to stay private longer.

**Dave McClure** (0:18)
I had the opportunity to invest in Uber, I thought, well, Travis has already made money, he's kind of a playboy, he's probably not gonna work that hard. Boy, I wish I'd made a different decision.
Welcome back to another really bad episode of Trading Places, the BC Secondary Podcast. On the show this week, we're going to talk a little bit about the macro position going on. I'm not quite sure if we're at war in Iran or not, but the Fed held the rates for the moment. Three people wanted to hike rates, so we might see some rate hikes in the future. A bunch of big tech earnings came out. Google came out last week, but this week, Microsoft, Meta, and a few others. Microsoft was the big winner, Meta was the big loser.
Lots of people spending money on CapEx. That's no surprise. The semiconductor market was all over the place. It was up, and then it was down, and then it was back up, and in the middle of that, somebody's AI fund blew up. $45 billion AI fund situational awareness, which did not seem to have much situational awareness, but I think they held on to their anthropic position. We'll see. SpaceX is reporting this week, Aman. We are holders of SpaceX, and we're going to be waiting with baited breath. Is that the phrase? First unlock might happen a few days later on August 6
We're teasing that OpenAI and Anthropic hack in our opener there, but both of those companies reported some security breaches that were pseudo-unauthorized. Their agents were trying to, I guess, get higher scores and cheat a little bit. Revolut is doing a tender offer that's priced at $115 billion, and we believe 11Lab has also been working on a tender that's probably around $22 billion. Then lastly, we'll cover a little bit, Travis Kalenick raised $1.7 billion for his company, Adams, and he also rides a jet ski to work. Aman, did you do that?

**Aman Verjee** (2:30)
Great way to get to the office, huh?

**Dave McClure** (2:32)
Exactly. Let's dive into our headlines here.
I guess, Aman, you're our rate watcher. What's been happening at the Fed this week?

**Aman Verjee** (2:41)
Well, they had their first meeting with Kevin Warsh, and as you suggested, they voted to hold rates steady. I guess, that's the good news. It's the first real meeting with Kevin in charge. So, he had an opportunity to put his imprint on the Fed. There's another meeting coming up in September, one in October, the one in December. This is the chart of probability expectations just based on Fed futures. You can go to CME FedWatch and do the math on, just based on features, now the trade, based on market pricing, predict whether the Fed's going to raise or not. And it looks like there's about an 88% chance right now that the Fed is going to raise rates between now and the end of the year. So the tone of the meeting was, hey, we're not going to move right now, but there were three dissenting votes out of the 12 to raise rates. There were nine that decided to hold, but the language was very much around concern about inflation. I will be very surprised if the Fed actually does raise rates between now and the end of the year.
Here's my take on it. I think what they said was, we do think there's inflationary pressure, but Kevin's been very clear about what the bond market is already doing and different ways that the Fed can control financial expectations. What the majority said was, they said they had the bond market has already done a fair amount of tightening. They have increased interest rates between the beginning of the year and today. So if you look at the yield curve today versus a year ago, it's already at 25, 50, 75 basis points across the board. So I think what the Fed is telling us is we do think that some amount of tightening of financial conditions is appropriate, but the market has already done it. We don't need to do any more. What they also said was the priority isn't raising interest rates on the short term. That's only one tool that the Fed has at its disposal. The other one is managing the balance sheet. So what it does in terms of buying bonds or selling bonds.