Dan Primack

What follows are seven VC deals culled from recent Regulation D filings with the SEC. They have not been otherwise disclosed: AdaptiveBlue, a Livingston, N.J.-based provider of a research and organization plug-in for the Firefox browser, has raised $4.52 million in Series B funding, according to a regulatory filing. Shareholders include Union Square Ventures and Biltmore Ventures (managed by Knightsbridge Capital Partners). www.adaptiveblue.com Blurb Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of self publishing software and services, has raised around $5 million in Series C funding, according to a regulatory filing. Return backers include Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners. It had previously raised around $14 million, plus

Earlier today, I reported that Highland Capital Partners had quietly invested $20 million into the $17.1 billion leveraged buyout of Harrah's Entertainment. My thesis was that this was a very strange commitment for an early/growth-stage venture capital firm like Highland, and that none of the available explanations seemed to hold justifiable water. Highland still hasn't called in to give its side, but a bunch of you have emailed to remind me that Battery Ventures participated on the $17.6 billion buyout of Freescale Semiconductor. Battery also got involved in the $4.3 billion buyout of travel reservations company Sabre Holdings. And then there was Spark Capital partnering with hedge fund Jana Partners on a bid for CNET (Velocity Interactive Group also participated, but not

Keith Grinstein, a general partner with Seattle-based VC firm Second Avenue Partners, has passed away at the age of 48 from an apparent heart attack. Keith began his career as an attorney and later made his fortune in the telecom industry with McCaw Cellular, AT&T Wireless and Nextel. In 2000, he and three partners co-founded Second […]

Last month, I wrote that TPG Capital’s $1.35 billion infusion into Washington Mutual was the worst private equity deal in history. Keeping with the theme of sweeping characterizations, TPG also seems to have been involved with the strangest venture capital deal in history. But TPG wasn’t actually the odd actor this time around. That dishonor goes to Highland Capital Partners. I hate to kick a firm after it plied me with liquor and Wolfgang Puck food, but this is so bizarre as to give me no other choice... Lexington, Mass.-based Highland earlier this year invested $20 million as part of TPG Capital and Apollo Management’s $17.1 billion buyout of Harrah’s Entertainment Inc. Let that sink in for a moment. An early-stage and growth-stage VC firm participated in a massive take-private acquisition in exchange for much less than a 1% equity stake. The $20 million check is virtually insignificant to mega-LBO firms like TPG and Apollo, but represented more than 2% of Highland’s current

Allan Thygesen has left The Carlyle Group, in order to launch a new early-stage VC firm. The stealth firm has enough partner capital to do select angel deals, but will begin pre-marketing its debut fund late this year. Formal fund-raising is expected to commence in early 2009. “When we set this in motion late last year, we hadn’t quite foreseen the global economic meltdown,” Thygesen explains. “So we’ll wait a bit longer than we had expected, and probably target a bit less money.” He declined to identify his two partners, except to say one was a longtime VC with prior operating experience, and that the other was a pure operator. Thygesen originally joined Carlyle in 2001, as a San Francisco-based managing director of what was then called Carlyle Venture Partners. The group has since evolved

For the past few months, peHUB has been serializing an upcoming book by Michael Butler, chairman and CEO of Seattle-based investment bank Cascadia Capital. He’s now done writing, so he sits down for 5 Questions: 1. Why did you decide to write a book? I was thinking about how much the world was starting to change, but that a lot of people in finance were so deep that they couldn’t pull their heads up to see it. What’s happened over the last couple of week reinforced that. I don’t think most people of Wall Street – and I have a lot of friends there because I used to work at Lehman – have a sense of just how pissed off

Last night I attended Highland Capital Partners’ 20th anniversary party, which commandeered the entire Boston Science Museum. Quite the bash, including a 3-on-3 basketball tournament for Highland portfolio companies (won by O Beverages), the Celtics championship trophy (I touched it), Celtics cheerleaders (I didn’t touch them), CEOs, limited partners, local politicians and former Melrose Place star Andrew Shue. Perhaps the best VC event I’ve ever been to in Boston, even though it wasn’t for area VCs (only one I saw was Howard Anderson, and he’s quite explicitly not a VC anymore). Very ebullient crowd on the surface, but things were pretty different when it came to one-on-one conversations. These were all off-the-record, but it's fair to say that I heard things that sound like a step beyond the tip of a glacier. Not just general credit concerns, but deals that have collapsed at the last minute due to pulled financing, new funds that can’t close because of cancelled commitments, LPs trying to quickly reduce asset class

ChemoCentryx is supposed to be public by now, having filed for a modest $57.5 million IPO last November. But that obviously hasn’t happened, since the IPO window has since been nailed shut, painted over and covered in crazy glue. So what’s a VC-backed biotech company to do? In the case of ChemoCentryx, the answer has been to […]

Lehman Brothers just issued a statement on the status of the investment management groups that are not included in the proposed sale to Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman. It doesn’t shed much light, although it also doesn’t discourage widespread speculation that the groups will soon transform themselves into independent entities. Here it is: As specified in a recent press release, the proposed sale of Neuberger Investment Management and several related asset management business units to Bain Capital Partners, LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC does not include Lehman Brothers' major direct private equity businesses such as Merchant Banking, Real Estate, Venture Capital and MLP. However, the investment teams for these funds remain intact and focused as we actively pursue the best strategic alternatives for these businesses going forward. As always, a primary consideration is the best interests of our investors. While we wait for definitive plans, there are still a pair of questions worth pondering: 1. What will happen to each fund's uncalled commitments from Lehman Brothers? For example, the dearly-deceased bank promised

Twitter is too secretive for its own good. Last month, I noticed that the company had filed a Form D with the SEC, indicating that it had called down just over $17 million of a $22 million Series C round (download here). This is the same round that Twitter had previously announced without a dollar amount, and the one that Om Malik pegged at $15 million. So I made some calls to see if this was really a $22 million deal (disclaimer: I cared because such minor revelations seem to get peHUB Techmeme love). A knowledgeable source insisted that the filing was incorrect, although he/she acknowledged that the actual round size was a bit closer to $17 million than to $15 million. But that source was on background, and I’ve got a legit SEC doc in my hand. So I tried getting in touch with the company. After a few days, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone replied with