Follow the Money Edition 19

Keppel breaks the equity silence. In real estate, capital now flows where compute, not concrete, is the asset.

Deep Insight: Keppel Breaks the Silence

This week, Singapore’s Keppel broke the real estate equity drought with a $1.5B raise to invest in data centers. The capital will be deployed across the Asia-Pacific region, in infrastructure that underpins the AI arms race—compute, storage, proximity to demand. This isn’t a traditional real estate play. It’s a geopolitical one. The raise came from the East, where sovereign capital, digital infrastructure, and national industrial policy are closely aligned. Keppel is leaning into that alignment, and the result is one of the first major equity raises we’ve seen in months.

That exception proves the rule. Traditional real estate equity remains frozen. Disrupted by the end of ZIRP, COVID-era dislocation, and volatile rate policy, the market has largely pivoted to credit—which continues to raise at both higher frequency and larger scale. Equity, when it shows up, is coming from strategic players backing infrastructure, not developers underwriting to hope.

Keppel didn’t break the pattern. They highlighted it.

VC Funding Rounds

• ️Cosmic Robotics, an SF-based developer of construction robots for solar farms, raised $4m in pre-seed funding. Giant Ventures led, joined by HCVC and MaC Ventures.

  • Quick Insight: With the world moving increasingly toward electricity as the primary method of energy-consumption, this problem space has meteoric potential. And we like that it says “TARS” on the side, like in Interstellar.

• Atomic, a supply chain planning platform, raised $3m in seed funding from DVx Ventures and Madrona Ventures.

• Friday Harbor, a Seattle-based mortgage origination platform for loan officers, raised $6m in seed funding led by Abstract Ventures.

• Iunu, a commercial greenhouse tech startup, raised $20m in Series B extension funding, per Axios Pro. S2G led, joined by Lewis & Clark Partners and Farm Credit Canada.

• Homemove, a London-based proptech for home-moving, raised $5m. Fuel Ventures led, joined by Blandford Family Office and Oxford Innovation.