Good morning! Venture-debt firms are expanding beyond their traditional software turf to sectors and businesses less likely to be disrupted by artificial intelligence, our Isaac Taylor writes.

Also, CVC Capital Partners has joined forces with several other investors to make an offer to take Italian drugmaker Recordati private, the Journal reports.

We have those stories and much more news below. Please, read on …

Venture-debt firms are expanding beyond their software industry core into sectors such as healthcare technology, clean-energy and asset-heavy companies, following widespread concerns of disruptions tied to artificial intelligence, WSJ Pro's Isaac Taylor reports. Deal value for financing provided to companies backed by venture capital rose almost 12% to $68.8 billion across more than 1,000 transactions last year in the U.S. from $61.5 billion in 2024, according to a joint report from venture-debt specialist Runway Growth Capital and industry researcher PitchBook.

European buyout firm CVC Capital Partners and investor Groupe Bruxelles Lambert have offered to take Recordati private with a bid that values the Italian drugmaker at €10.73 billion, or about $12.47 billion, and could rank among the biggest healthcare deals in Europe in recent years, Adrià Calatayud reports for the Journal. The bid follows CVC's earlier takeover approach to Milan-listed Recordati, which CVC has backed since 2018 and in which it holds a nearly 47% equity stake. Recordati had said the initial approach earlier this year was conditional on finding partners and funding for the deal. Other participants include the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and StepStone Group, Recordati said.

Apollo Global Management's proposed £1.52 billion, or $2.04 billion, takeover of industrial heat treatment services provider Bodycote pushed up the London-listed company's shares to a four-year high Friday, Ian Walker reports. The New York buyout firm would pay 885 pence a share in the proposal under discussion, the company said in a regulatory filing. The indicated price, excluding an expected 16.1 pence a share dividend, represents a 27% premium to Thursday's closing price of 698.50 pence.

Edelweiss Alternative Asset Advisors, also known as EAAA India Alternatives, is backing Cyient Semiconductors with a roughly $30 million investment, including about $10 million in equity and $20 million in structured debt. The deal at gives the company a post-money valuation of about $500 million. Cyient's chips are used in data centers as well as the robotics and automotive industries, among others.

Specialist private-equity firm Avista Healthcare Partners in New York and Belgian family office Damier Group have agreed to acquire Sanotact Group, a German maker of vitamins, minerals and supplements.

Ardian in Paris and Lamar Development have acquired a seven-floor office building in Madrid with plans to redevelop its roughly 10,000 square meters, or about 107,600 square feet, of interior space. Lamar is managing the project.

Our add-on deal interactive tool allows you to sort and analyze volumes of add-on deal data compiled by WSJ Pro. View more.

Bain Capital in Boston is reportedly near a deal to sell Australian aged-care company Estia Health to buyers including Stonepeak for the equivalent of about $1.78 billion, according to multiple reports in local media. The Australian said that the buyout firm paid just 838 million Australian dollars, or about $597.4 million, for the business just two years ago.

Separately, Bain Capital plans to sell shares in automotive electrical components maker Dhoot Transmission through an initial public offering of shares in India, where the international manufacturer is based. The Boston firm has backed the business since at least early last year, when India's Economic Times said it acquired a 49% stake through a growth investment from its private-equity strategy. Mangalam Capital also plans to sell shares in the IPO.

The infrastructure investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System in Toronto, which manages the equivalent of about $29.68 billion, is selling its roughly 25% interest in Spanish energy logistics company Exolum in separate deals, with Stoneshield Capital acquiring a 15% interest. An unnamed second investor is buying the remaining portion, according to Omers. The pipeline and fuel tank storage operator has about 2,300 employees and generated revenue of about €1.3 billion, or about $1.51 billion, last year. Omers has backed the business since 2016. The sales follow a €770 million refinancing of the pension system's Exolum investment in December.

Asset manager Keppel in Singapore won't be selling a stake in mobile telecommunications operator M1 to strategic buyer Tuas in Australia after all, as Tuas said Friday the deal has been terminated amid allegations that another of Sydney-listed Tuas's units used radio frequencies without authorization, Stuart Condie reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The $1.1 billion deal to sell Keppel's entire 83.9% stake in M1 to Tuas's Simba subsidiary was initially disclosed in August. On Monday, Tuas said Singapore's telecom regulator had suspended its review of the transaction after learning that Simba may have used unauthorized radio frequency bands.

Kayne Anderson's real estate arm has closed on $5.12 billion for its Kayne Anderson Real Estate Partners VII opportunistic equity investment fund, the largest such vehicle in the firm's history. The firm's property investment unit is partly backed by AIMS Petershill, an investment fund managed by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, a regulatory filing shows. Including the new fund, Kayne Anderson Real Estate manages about $21 billion.

Chinese investment firm BAI Capital has collected $600 million so far for its latest growth fund, holding a first close and continuing toward its $800 million target for the vehicle. The firm began as part of Bertelsmann Group's Bertelsmann Asia Investments and closed its first independent fund in 2021.

Venture capitalist John Doerr, the chair of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sees generative artificial intelligence as ushering in a tsunami of innovation, WSJ Pro's Matthew Strozier reports for the Journal. "It has been underhyped. We don’t know how AI is going to shape the new world of education, employment, healthcare—life as we know it," Doerr said in a wide-ranging interview. “Just three years after ChatGPT was launched, 50% of Americans say they use generative AI, and the value creation is off the charts.”

On the list of investors set to generate billion-dollar gains with stakes in SpaceX, one name appears twice. Gavin Baker first bet on Elon Musk’s rocket maker in 2015, as a star stock picker at Fidelity Investments. At the time, privately held SpaceX was far from a sure bet—it had suffered some high-profile failures and hadn’t yet landed a rocket, Peter Rudegeair writes for the Journal. Baker stuck with it after Fidelity and bought up shares through his hedge-fund firm, Atreides Management, when SpaceX was still well off much of Wall Street’s radar screen.

SoftBank Group shares rose sharply Friday, adding nearly 12% to the previous day's jump following news that OpenAI, one of its biggest investments, is preparing to file for an initial public offering soon, Kosaku Narioka reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The stock rose to a 20% daily limit Thursday and is now just shy of the ¥6,828.8 record close, equivalent to $42.95, reached in October. The Journal reported last week that bankers have been helping the ChatGPT maker on a draft IPO prospectus it plans to file confidentially with regulators soon. OpenAI made up about a quarter of SoftBank's $300 billion equity portfolio value, second only to its stake in British chip-design unit Arm Holdings, as of the end of March.

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