Dan Primack

SVB Capital, the fund-of-funds unit of Silicon Valley Bank, last week laid off seven employees, including five investment professionals. Firm spokeswoman Carrie Merritt said, in part: “It was a case of prioritization. For example, we’re looking at a broad global program that has taken on more of an Asia-centric focus, so we had some people in London who didn’t make as much sense to have, in terms of appropriate staffing… We also were looking to centralize some things like research with the larger SVB organization, so we basically tightened up some of those.”

Jim Moran today will be introduced as the newest partner with North Bridge Venture Partners, after most recently serving as CEO of NBVP portfolio company Covergence (sold to Acme Packet in May). So we’ve got 5 Questions for Jim, who is in the midst of relocating from Columbus, Ohio to the Boston ‘burbs. 1. You are a longtime entrepreneur and operating guy, with Covergence, eDocs, Virtusa and CheckFree. Why move over to the dark side of venture capital? [Laughs] I do hear people call it the dark side quite often. I gave it a lot of thought and, quite frankly, think that this is a great point in time to get into the venture business. Maybe around half of the funds out there right now are going to go away, and the venture economics are going to go back to

As some of you know, my first real journalism job was helping to launch and manage a youth-focused community newspaper based in Roxbury, Mass., which qualifies as part of Boston’s inner city (both geographically and figuratively). Small operation, which means a lot of my time was spent hustling for advertisers, which typically were local businesses. In all my conversations with these enterprising entrepreneurs, I never heard terms like “venture capital” or “growth capital.” I did, however, often hear the term “bank” with some sort of expletive preceding it. The problem, of course, was on both sides of the proverbial coin: The inner city businesses had no idea how to access the private capital markets, and the private capital markets paid to attention to inner city businesses.

Blame the lawyers. It's a universal excuse, working for everything from contentious divorces to securities fraud. Now we can add rescinded fund commitments to the list. At issue is a $10 million commitment from the The San Francisco Employees' Retirement System to Domain Associates, a healthcare-focused VC firm that last week closed its eighth fund with $500 million. San Francisco's money wasn't part of the final stash, because the two sides reached an impasse over fiduciary responsibility language that the pension system insisted be in the final partnership documents. Details are still a bit fuzzy as to what specific fiduciary issues SFERS wanted beefed up, but peHUB has learned that the language was inserted by

Venture capital performance deteriorated in Q1, according to data released this morning by Cambridge Associates and the NVCA. It was the third-straight quarter of decline, although the rate slowed, and was seen over the quarterly, one-year, three-year, five-year and 10-year horizons (mild improvement for 15-year and 20-year). Get the full report after the jump...

I spent some time on the phone yesterday with Domain Associates partner Nicole Vitullo, whose firm just closed its eighth fund with $500 million. After discussing why Domain lowered its target from an initial $700 million, we got to talking about the glut of VC-backed, late-stage pharma companies that are desperate for the public markets to accept them. Such companies and their investors traditionally have used IPOs as financial events rather than as liquidity events, which can help provide the final push through Phase III clinical trials and into FDA-approved commercialization. But it had been more than a year since any drugmaker had gone public, until Cumberland Pharma did so last night. As Vitullo said, the offering was one that healthcare VCs were keeping close tabs on. Some video thoughts on what that offering could mean to the bigger picture, after the jump:

A few months back, we reported that Mohr Davidow Ventures was looking to raise some "annex" capital for its seventh fund. We also noted the irony of bulking up this particular fund, since it had originally closed in 2002 with $850 million, before slimming down to $450 million via a pair of fund size reductions. Today, we noticed a regulatory filing indicating that MDV seems to have closed the annex (or at least part of it), with $27 million in new capital. So the total is now up to around 57% of what MDV raised in the first place for Fund VII, whose active portfolio includes such companies as Nanosolar, PacketMotion and Proofpoint. What we also noticed was that MDV appears to have added annex capital to its two subsequent funds. One filings shows that MDV has raised $25 million for Fund VIII, a $400 million vehicle raised in 2005, and

MMO game publisher Turbine has raised $50 million in new VC funding, according to a regulatory filing discovered by peHUB. The investment comes just one month before Turbine launches its first-ever hybrid product, a Dungeons & Dragons Online spinoff that will be free to play with various premium (read: pay) sections. Turbine did not list any new investors for the "Series D" round, of which just over $6.5 million has been called down. Return backers include Columbia Capital, Highland Capital Partners, Granite Global Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners and Tudor Ventures. The Westwood, Mass.-based company had previously raised around $95 million, including a $40 million Series C round last April. No valuations have been disclosed.

Nick Sinai is the latest venture capitalist headed to Washington, where he will serve as Energy and Environmental Director at the Federal Communications Commission. In an email to friends and colleagues, Sinai wrote: President Obama and the Congress have asked the FCC, led by Chairman Julius Genachowski, to form a National Broadband Task Force to deliver a plan to Congress in February 2010. I'll be leading a team that will examine how broadband/communications infrastructure and policies can support our national energy and environmental goals, with an emphasis on the Smart Grid. Sinai most recently was with Tenaya Capital, which he joined as a principal in January 2008. For those not familiar with Tenaya, it's a new firm previously known as Lehman Brothers Venture

What follows are six VC deals culled from recent Regulation D filings with the SEC. None of them has been otherwise disclosed: * Meru Networks Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based developer of wireless infrastructure solutions, has expanded its Series E round to over $87 million. It had announced a $30 million first close earlier this year, led by Vision Capital. Return backers had included Clearstone Venture Partners, NeoCarta Ventures, BlueStream Ventures, The D. E. Shaw Group, Evercore Partners, Tenaya Capital and Monitor Ventures. The company has now raised over $160 million in total VC funding since its 2002 inception. www.merunetworks.com