It’s been a rough start to the year, as venture capital funding hit a three-year low in the first quarter, while multiple bank collapses spread fears about the health of the financial sector. But private equity held up “better than expected,” says Tim Clarke, a senior private equity analyst for data provider PitchBook. The worry is, it could be downhill from here for the rest of the year.
“In my mind, there was a stress test, [and] PE passed it almost on every front, including fundraising, including deployment, which stabilized, and it also did five really big deals around that bank failure,” Clarke told me yesterday.
