Luisa Beltran

Frank Quattrone's investment bank reeled in a big one. Today, Google announced it was buying Motorola Mobility Holdings for $40 a share, or $12.5 billion. The deal is the largest ever for Google, according to Dealbook. More importantly, the Motorola Mobility sale is the biggest transaction that Qatalyst Partners has ever advised on, according to Thomson Reuters. It is nearly double Qatalyst's next largest deal which is Texas Instrument's buy of National Semiconductor announced earlier this year (this weighed in at $6.5 billion). Qatalyst, along with Goldman Sachs, advised National Semiconductor. The Motorola transaction vaults Qatalyst into 17th place for U.S. M&A advisors with 14 deals, according to Dealogic. This is up from 24th where it stood last Friday, Dealogic says. As such, Qatalyst is isn't yet in bulge bracket territory but it's gearing up. J.P. Morgan is currently No.1 while Goldman Sachs is No. 2 for U.S. M&A advisors, Dealogic says.

Did broad market volatility last week slam shut the IPO window? It's not really clear. IPOs, in August, typically fall into a lull as much of Wall Street goes on vacation. Fourth quarter is usually the strongest time for new offerings. But August has been very slow. Eleven IPOs were pulled last week due to poor market conditions. Of these, four were PE-backed, according to Dealogic. Carbonite, last week, succeeded in going public (shares of the company rose nearly 24%). Including Carbointe, only three deals have priced this month (SandRidge Permian Trust and American Capital Mortgage Investment Corp. are the other two). Only one other deal is on deck for August, Dealogic says. It's not clear what will happen to companies waiting to go pubic. There are 54 private equity-backed companies that have filed for IPOs this year, worth a combined $12.54 billion, Dealogic says. Last year at this time, we also had 54 PE-backed companies that registered for an offering, raising a combined $15.8 billion. This included HCA's $3.5 billion deal. The IPO window will likely open back up but it's not clear what companies will be able to go pubilc. Of course, just because a company files for an IPO doesn't necessarily mean it will go public. Many times, companies file and just sit in registration as they wait for the perfect time to IPO. Or, as they wait, they get sold. Here's a list of the top 10 PE-backed IPO's that are currently in registration, according to Dealogic.

I hope John Doerr has an agent. The Kleiner Perkins partner emerged the winner of yesterday's poll. Thirty-seven percent of voters picked Doerr as the most deserving to get his own reality TV show. Mark Leder, Sun Capital's co-CEO, placed a close second with 31.3%. The biggest surprise? Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chairman and CEO, who ran a very distant fourth for much of the day only to rally late Thursday (at one point Schwarzman was running neck-in-neck with Doerr for the lead). But Schwarzman didn't prevail. He ended up a respectable third with 25.4%. DFJ Esprit's Simon Cook, meanwhile, came in last with 6% (sorry Simon!).

In a leap of faith, Carbonite shrugged off broad market volatility and went public Thursday. Shares of Carbonite opened at $10.93, above its $10 IPO price. The stock closed at $12.35, up $2.35 or 23.5% on volume of 1.2 million shares. The online backup company was the first to successfully price its IPO this week. Yesterday, Carbonite sold 6.25 million shares at $10 each, the bottom of its expected $10-$11 price range (which was itself lowered from its prior target of $15 to $17 a share). Carbonite is offering to sell about 5.4 million shares while some stockholders are providing 883,527 shares. BofA Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan are joint bookrunners on the IPO. Other underwriters include William Blair & Co., Canaccord Genuity, Oppenheimer & Co. and Pacific Crest Securities. The underwriters have the option to buy another 937,500 shares.

ISGN Corp. has closed $30 million in funding from current investors including New Enterprise Associates, IndoUS Venture Partners and CFCL Overseas Ltd., a KK Birla company. Bensalem, PA-based ISGN provides mortgage technology and services in the US.

Ascentium Capital, which is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, has launched. LKCM Capital Group, the alternative investment vehicle for Luther King Capital Management, is leading the group of investors. Kingwood, Texas-based Ascentium, a lender focused on small-balance commercial loans and leases, is buying a $150 million portfolio of commercial loans and leases from Main […]

High Street Partners has closed $6.3 million in Series C financing led by Baird Venture Partners. Sigma Partners and Gold Hill Capital also invested. High Street offers cloud-based business services.

A Daily Ticker story troubled me today. According to the story, there is still "considerable risk" in the banking sector. Regulators, according to the story, have done little to tackle the problems that both caused and were revealed by the 2008 crisis: excessive leverage, lack of transparency and distortion that created "too big to fail" institutions. Basically, "too big to fail" has gotten worse. The biggest banks control an even greater portion of U.S. deposits and nothing has been done to make bank holdings more transparent, according to the story.

Many M&A deals include a go-shop but do such provisions actually work? I put this question to John Pollack and David Rosewater, M&A partners with Schulte Roth & Zabel. Pollack and Rosewater recently conducted a review of 25 mergers this year involving private equity and public companies. The deals had a minimum of $500 million in enterprise value. Pollack and Rosewater found that about half of the deals surveyed, or 14, included a "go-shop." J. Crew's $3 billion sale to TPG Capital and Leonard Green had a go-shop, as well as Jo-Ann Stores' $1.6 billion sale to Leonard Green.

Minus said Monday that it has raised $1 million from IDG Capital Partners. New York-based Minus is a file sharing tech startup.