Daily Brief Private Markets: Love and more

Executive Summary

• Omnichannel Regional Positioning: Love, Bonito operates as a vertically integrated, direct-to-consumer womenswear brand tailored to Asian proportions, maintaining a physical presence across seven markets, including Thailand from June 2026, alongside a global e-commerce platform. Following a strategic exit from unprofitable channels and a 60.0% reduction in new style production, the company achieved EBITDA breakeven in 2025 while targeting US$79.0m in revenue for FY26.
• Data-Driven Inventory Efficiency: A key value driver is a proprietary data infrastructure that forecasts consumer demand with a mean average percentage error below 10.0%, limiting overproduction and costly inventory markdowns. Combined with a vertically integrated model that retains the full retail margin, this discipline underpinned the move to EBITDA breakeven in 2025, although the capital-intensive omnichannel model continues to constrain free cash flow, and regional expansion has so far been funded by US$64.5m in cumulative institutional capital.
• Recurring Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities: The business faces material regulatory and reputational exposure from repeated data security incidents, including a July 2026 vulnerability that potentially exposed customer names, contact details, and partial payment information and is now under investigation by the Personal Data Protection Commission. This follows a December 2019 malicious code breach affecting more than 5,000 customers, for which the company was fined S$24.0k in 2022, pointing to recurring weaknesses in the platform’s data governance and security controls.

• Global Omnichannel Retail Positioning: Castlery operates a direct-to-consumer (D2C) furniture model that has grown from a Singapore start-up into an international brand, generating around 85% of group revenue outside Singapore. The company combines a digital-first platform with a growing network of showrooms to capture demand among urban professionals and young families.
• Proven Top-Line Revenue Expansion: Group revenue grew 63% to US$180m in FY23, the latest year disclosed, driven by rapid growth in the United States, and we estimate FY26 revenue of US$268.7m. Recent technology investments, such as an AI shopping assistant that cut customer service response times by 34%, support efficiency as the business scales.
• Concentrated US Supply Chain Exposure: US import records show a single Vietnamese manufacturer accounting for 91.1% of Castlery’s US-bound shipments, creating an acute vulnerability to localised production halts and shipping bottlenecks in its largest market. US tariffs have already squeezed margins, and pre-tax earnings at the Singapore operating entity fell to US$0.7m in FY24.

• Covariant raised a $75M Series C extension in April 2023 at an approximately $625M post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $222M.
• In August 2024, Amazon entered into a non-exclusive licensing and talent agreement with Covariant.
• Covariant competes in a warehouse robotics market shifting from standalone picking cells toward vertically integrated fulfillment platforms and broadly available physical-AI models.

• Sanctuary AI has raised approximately $148.6M in disclosed funding through April 2026.
• Sanctuary AI builds Physical AI systems that combine vision, touch, and learned decision-making to automate industrial tasks.
• Sanctuary AI sells enterprises a full-stack automation system combining AI task-policy development, systems integration, robot hardware configuration, and deployment engineering.

• Vannevar Labs reported closing $80M in annual contract value (ACV) in 2024 and completing its third consecutive profitable year.
• Vannevar Labs reached a $1.5B valuation in October 2024.
• Vannevar Labs is expanding from intelligence search into a broader mission-agent platform while entering customer segments and geographies that increase its addressable market.