I could spend hours discussing early-stage startup operations and community-based marketing, but deal flow is my blind spot. But when investment banking firm UBS picked up financial robot-advisor Wealthfront for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal this week, I noticed. "At those prices, the company's exit price is a win in that it represents a 2x or greater multiple on its final private valuations," wrote Alex Wilhelm in The Exchange. "But its exit value is also parsable from a number of alternative perspectives: AUM, customers and revenue," he added. Examining each of those factors in turn, Alex found that the deal is more than just a "next-gen push" intended "to reach rich young Americans," as some headlines suggested.

As we get closer to the end of the year, we're running more stories that look back at topics we examined in depth over the last several months, and several that offer well-informed predictions for the year ahead. This week, Bill Taranto, president of Merck's Global Health Innovation Fund, wrote a TechCrunch article that explored six digital health trends his corporate VC fund is tracking as we enter 2022. Between Q1 and Q3 2021, healthcare startups landed $21.3 billion in VC, "dwarfing the previous record of $14.6 billion set in 2020," writes Taranto. "Companies with strong offerings, management teams and balance sheets are poised to capture tremendous value." According to Crunchbase, Merck GHI has made 75 investments with 22 exits so far, including companies that span everything from drug discovery to diabetes detection. Artificial intelligence, IoT and data analytics are the primary drivers of innovation, says Taranto, "especially with data becoming the central currency of healthcare."

Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative. I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can't remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one of those desks. Everyone I know who's obtained a home or business loan in the recent past started with an online application process. For this morning's column, Alex Wilhelm interviewed Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart, an AI-powered fintech lender that expects to see growth increase 114% this year. A forecast like that suggests that retail banks have gotten comfortable with using automated tools to calculate risk, which may help explain all the empty desks at my local branch.