Navigating Finance in a Transformed Economy
After more than three years of silence, Capital Call returns with a renewed mission. What began as a window into the European venture capital ecosystem has evolved into something more ambitious: a comprehensive curation service for financial professionals seeking to understand how the dominant companies of tomorrow are being funded today.
The Great Recalibration
Not long ago, venture capital seemed poised to devour traditional finance. The narrative was compelling: as software ate the world, venture capital would eat financial services. Technology startups would disrupt incumbents across every sector, and the venture model would reign supreme.
Then came 2022.
The bursting bubble brought a humbling reality check. Venture capital, far from conquering finance, found itself in retreat. Valuations plummeted, unicorns stumbled, and the easy money dried up.
Ironically, 2022 also saw the debut of ChatGPT and the rise of AI as the next great technological shift. Yet this moment revealed another twist in the narrative: these advancements were primarily funded not by venture capital, but by tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google deploying their vast balance sheets.
Beneath market cycles, a deeper transformation is unfolding—the very structure of global capital is being reshaped. The US is shifting its economic approach, reviving industrial policy, politicising access to capital, and using the dollar as a strategic tool. This marks a break from decades of liberalised, dollar-driven globalisation. At the same time, China is reinforcing its own model, combining state-led economic planning with technological investment to expand its influence across key industries. These shifts have profound consequences for capital flows, reserve currencies, and the regulations that determine the cost of capital.
Finance is no longer just evolving with innovation—it has become a key weapon in geopolitical strategy.
As technological shifts, funding model disruptions, and geopolitical realignments converge, the financial landscape is adapting to a fundamentally transformed techno-economic reality.
This isn’t just about digitisation. It’s about a fundamental rewiring of how capital flows to innovation across every segment of financial services in today’s rapidly evolving economy.
Beyond Venture Capital
As venture capital undergoes its own metamorphosis, the ripple effects extend much further:
Private equity is blurring the lines between growth and buyout strategies, developing hybrid approaches for technology-driven businesses.
Investment banking is rethinking deal structures for companies with vastly different economic profiles from their industrial-age predecessors.
Private debt is emerging as a key funding mechanism for scaled technology firms seeking flexible capital.
Alternative assets, from infrastructure to real estate, are integrating technology both as an investment target and as an operational tool.
Public markets are creating new frameworks to value and trade shares in businesses whose assets are primarily intangible, even as they lose ground to private markets, where companies can access abundant capital while avoiding regulatory burdens and short-term scrutiny.
This sustained shift toward private markets at the expense of public exchanges is one of the most consequential transformations in modern finance. Companies are staying private longer, accessing deeper pools of capital without public disclosures, and creating value that remains out of reach for ordinary investors. At the same time, established public companies are increasingly going private to pursue strategic transformations away from the pressures of quarterly earnings.
Our Mission
This evolving landscape demands new maps. Capital Call aims to be your cartographer.
Each edition will curate the most insightful resources around a specific theme in modern finance, with a consistent focus: how are tomorrow’s dominant companies being funded? We will explore emerging structures, cross-border innovations, regulatory shifts, and technological breakthroughs shaping capital formation.
Our audience remains the venture capital community that has supported us from the beginning, but we now welcome a broader coalition: private equity professionals, investment bankers, asset managers, corporate finance leaders, and anyone navigating the intersection of technology and capital.
What to Expect
Rather than surface-level news, Capital Call delivers carefully curated deep dives. Each edition features:
Long-form analyses exploring structural changes in financial markets
Practitioner perspectives from those pioneering new funding approaches
Historical context to place current innovations in perspective
Cross-border insights highlighting regional variations in capital formation
Regulatory developments that shape how companies access funding
We won’t chase every headline or trend. Instead, we will focus on substantive developments that financial professionals need to understand as they allocate capital in this new era.
Welcome back to Capital Call, a curated newsletter by Willy Braun, Nicolas Colin and Vincent Touati-Tomas, delivering insights on how dominant companies of the future are funded in an evolving financial landscape.
