Tuesday, October 20, 2026

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LXS.DE: a 2028 sale it can force

Lanxess can force Advent to buy at least half its Envalior stake in April 2028, potentially raising about €745 million to reduce net debt.

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AI labs and data labeling companies (firms that turn experts’ knowledge into training data for the labs) could make my $12-19M sale range for Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) look conservative. My previous write-up’s sale comps were five cybersecurity companies buying small startups that detect, stop, or recover from ransomware, and I valued a Nubeva sale at $12-19M, the low end of those deals. AI labs and data labeling companies would widen the set of buyers beyond cybersecurity companies, but I found none that has bought a ransomware recovery company like Nubeva. The closest deals were for a stake in a ransomware recovery company, malware data, and specialist teams: → Microsoft $MSFT: Made an equity investment in Veeam, a data protection and ransomware recovery company, in February 2025, as part of a partnership to build AI-based threat detection and other Microsoft AI services into Veeam’s products. → Google $GOOGL: Owns VirusTotal, a malware-scanning site it bought in 2012, and Mandiant, the incident-response firm it bought for $5.4B in 2022. Its experimental Sec-Gemini model, introduced in April 2025, draws on Mandiant’s threat intelligence data. → OpenAI: Agreed to buy Promptfoo in March 2026 for an undisclosed price. Promptfoo, which tests AI systems for security holes, was valued at $86M after its July 2025 funding round, per PitchBook. → Mercor (a data labeling company): Agreed to buy Deeptune, which builds practice environments for AI agents, in July 2026, months after Andreessen Horowitz led Deeptune’s $43M Series A. The two 2026 deals didn’t disclose prices, and Mandiant and Veeam are far larger businesses than Nubeva, so I can’t put a new number on a sale. Still, my $12-19M range is probably conservative now, since it only counted cybersecurity companies as buyers, and an AI lab or data labeling company would be paying for Nubeva’s engineers and model rather than its ~$500K of FY2026 revenue. But an AI buyer wouldn’t get patents on what it’s paying for. Nubeva’s patents would cover how it recovers files and how it detects hidden encryption, but it won’t patent its binary analysis (figuring out what malware programs do) at all, and CEO Randy Chou explained why: “Anything you patent, that means you have to show how you did it. If you show how you did it, well, somebody can train an LLM to go do it.” So the model is only worth what Nubeva can prove it does, through a signed contract, a named partner, or test results.

Carecloud News

CareCloud may attract a private-equity buyer after its Q3 call, with acquiring enough shares the main obstacle to a take-private deal.

Twenty Years in the Dark

Tower Properties, $TPRP, went dark after a 2006 squeeze-out cut holders below 300, leaving a Kemper-controlled apartment and office…

TSOH Weekly Roundup (10/16/2026)

Bumble agreed to a $1.3 billion take-private deal, while Netflix cut about 1,000 jobs and Meta discussed its Muse superintelligence models.

CHGG · long

Chegg Inc

Chegg is framed as a binary long with 500% upside against 20% downside.

Namib Minerals: Research Note

Namib Minerals posted H1 adjusted EBITDA of $19.0 million, up 76%, as higher gold prices offset lower production.

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