Good Monday morning! Today our Maria Armental delves into the IPO market, where some recent deals have given rise to hopes that the channel may be reestablishing itself as an exit ramp for buyout shops coping with a rising mass of businesses acquired years earlier.

Also, our Luis Garcia takes a look at last week's DigitalBridge deal to acquire ArcLight. It all depends on SoftBank's pending acquisition of DigitalBridge.

We have those stories and more below, so please scroll on down...

The anticipated mega-IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are fanning private equity’s hopes that initial public offerings will once again be a viable exit path for the industry’s nearly 33,000 unsold businesses, WSJ Pro's Maria Armental writes. The first quarter’s total deal value represented the strongest start of any year since 2021, with a combined $9.9 billion raised through 35 U.S. IPOs, according to specialist firm Renaissance Capital. Companies backed by private equity and venture capital helped drive the median deal size to $229 million, the highest since 2009, Renaissance said. While a flurry of private equity-held companies have recently registered confidentially for public offerings, a much larger number are expected to file for IPOs soon, bankers and industry consultants say.

Data-center investor DigitalBridge Group is already taking advantage of its pending acquisition by SoftBank Group by striking its own deal, which shows DigitalBridge’s ambition to expand as a large artificial intelligence-infrastructure investor even as it becomes part of the Tokyo technology giant, WSJ Pro's Luis Garcia writes, citing industry analysts. DigitalBridge is buying energy-infrastructure investor ArcLight Capital Partners in a deal valued at as much as $1.05 billion. DigitalBridge invests in assets such as data centers, cell towers and fiber-optic networks, while ArcLight focuses on power plants, utility-scale battery systems and energy pipelines. Together, they would manage more than $150 billion in assets. The deal comes at a time of soaring investment in data centers and related infrastructure to support artificial-intelligence deployment.

SoftBank Group plans to plow at least $52 billion into building a network of data centers in France, and the amount could rise to $87 billion, Sam Schechner reports for the Journal. The Tokyo-listed technology investor aims to help advance Europe’s goal of tech independence with what would be the continent’s largest artificial-intelligence infrastructure project.

Buyout firm CVC Capital Partners is acquiring the food-ingredients business of International Flavors & Fragrances in a deal that values the unit at $4.3 billion, including debt, the Journal reports. The seller plans to retain a 10% interest in the business, which produces emulsifiers used to make food production more efficient, sweeteners and paste for gelato among other products. The unit generated sales of almost $3.28 billion last year.

In a seperate deal, CVC Capital Partners is investing in Greek utility Public Power Corp., joining the national government in providing €4.25 billion, or about $4.95 billion, in equity capital to the Athens-listed business. The company also operates in Romania, serving around 8.6 million customers in the two countries, and aims to expand in Italy, Bulgaria and Croatia. CVC is investing in the company's shares through its CVC Capital Partners IX fund.

Atinum Investment and IMM Investment led a $135 million growth investment in computing company Xcena, joined by existing backers including SBI Investment and Mirae Asset Capital. The fresh capital will help the company develop its technology designed to enhance artificial intelligence-driven computing.

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

MidOcean Partners in New York is selling software provider Zonda to strategic buyer CoStar Group for $800 million in cash, Chris Wack reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The Newport Beach, Calif., business supplies users with home construction data and software as well as residential real estate market analytics and has over 3,000 customers, including residential builders and lenders. MidOcean has backed the company since 2018, according to the firm's website.

Warburg Pincus and investor Tiptree have sold insurance broker Fortegra Group to strategic buyer DB Insurance in South Korea under a deal that called for DB to pay about $1.65 billion in cash for the business. Fortegra had net income of about $140 million on $3.07 billion in gross written premiums last year. Tiptree acquired Fortegra in 2014, taking the listed company private for about $218 million, while Warburg first backed the Jacksonville, Fla.-based specialty insurance services provider in 2022, according to the firm's website.

European asset manager EQT AB plans to raise €21 billion, or roughly $24.49 billion, for its EQT Infrastructure VII fund but hasn't set a hard cap for the vehicle. The Stockholm-based firm closed a predecessor pool at its upper limit of €21.5 billion during the first half of last year and plans to pursue the same strategy of investing in things like water treatment systems and rail services with the new fund.

Atlas Merchant Capital in New York aims to raise $750 million for its Atlas Merchant Capital Fund III, a regulatory filing indicates. The firm set up by Robert Diamond and David Schamis focuses on long-term investments in financial services companies and managed about $593 million at the end of last year, a separate filing shows.

DalFort Capital Partners in Dallas has closed DalFort Capital Partners Fund II with $166 million, including $155 million from fund limited partners and an $11 million general partner commitment. The firm invests in industrial businesses in the lower middle market.

Josh Gruenbaum, a senior Trump adviser, oversaw the awarding of one government contract and pushed for another to technology companies backed by Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital, 10 months after investing in one of Thrive's funds, the Journal reported, citing newly released government disclosures. Gruenbaum led $115 billion in purchasing across the federal government as commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which is part of the General Services Administration. In January, FAS awarded Databricks, a Thrive-backed artificial-intelligence company, a $1.8 million sole-source contract to update software it had already supplied to optimize the agency’s procurement analytics and fraud-detection capabilities. Gruenbaum’s Thrive investment the prior spring was in a $194 million Thrive fund backing Databricks, the disclosure form and Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. Gruenbaum said he "recused myself from all of those contracts.”

Wealth manager investor TRIA Capital Partners is backing multi-family office Offit Capital in New York with a minority investment to fuel Offit's expansion. The firm already manages about $22 billion. TRIA specializes in backing wealth managers with growth capital.

To Blue Owl Capital Co-Chief Executive Marc Lipschultz, the worst of its investor sentiment crisis has passed, though there will likely be elevated redemption requests and moderated inflows for the rest of the year, Nicholas G. Miller reports for Dow Jones Newswires. Speaking at an investor conference last week, Lipschultz said the New York firm now sees a change in investors' tone, moving away from "freakout conversation." Some Blue Owl vehicles were hit with significant withdrawal requests earlier this year.

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Maria Armental; Ted Bunker; Chris Cumming; Luis Garcia; Laura Kreutzer; Isaac Taylor; Chitra Vemuri.