Luisa Beltran
Just a little more about Berkshire Partners, please?
Yesterday, the Boston PE firm announced that its most recent fund, Berkshire Fund VIII, had closed at $4.5 billion. This comes after peHUB reported in May that the fund was red-hot and clocking in at $4 billion.
Berkshire's official target was $4 billion back in January, a source says, but the PE firm knew it could get to $4.5 billion. A first close, of $3 billion, occurred in May and a final close, adding another $1.5 billion, happened yesterday, the person says.
"The interest level was there," the person says. "They had pretty good conviction [that they could reach $4.5 billion] when they started."
One change with fund VIII? The pool will have a "tiered carry structure" that allows it to receive a premium 25% carried interest if it hits a certain benchmark. By comparison, Berkshire's fund VII had a flat 25% carry. To attain the premium 25%, fund VIII must perform in the top quartile of the PE industry, the source says.
Bill Ready has joined Accel Partners as an executive in residence. Ready joined Accel from iPay Technologies, a division of Jack Henry and Associates, where he served as president.
Elias Mendoza has joined Union Square Advisors as a partner in its New York office. Mendoza, most recently, was VP and global head of corporate development at IBM.
New Enterprise Associates and Insight Venture Partners have provided $136 million in funding to Cvent. Greenspring Associates also participated in the first round. Cvent, of Mclean, Va., provides online software for event management.
Sequoia Capital is leading a $10 million Series A round for MoboTap. Matrix Partners is also participating. MoboTap is the mobile technology developer behind the Dolphin Browser.
The results of our most recent survey produced some varied results.
Yesterday, we asked you if VC fundraising will continue to suck for the rest of the year. We posed this question after data for the first half of 2011 revealed some disappointing numbers.
According to the NVCA, 76 funds raised $10.2 billion from January to June. This compares to 90 funds that collected roughly $6.1 billion during the same time period of 2010. While more dollars were raised, the number of funds out looking for money dropped by 15%. This marked the lowest number of funds garnering commitments since the first half of 1995, according to the NVCA.
It feels like Qatalyst Partners is everywhere these days.
This week, Frank Quattrone's investment bank advised on two big-name deals. The most notable was Electronic Arts' proposed buy of PopCap (Quatalyst advised PopCap) and the second was Citrix's acquisition of Cloud.com (Qatalyst provided guidance Citrix).
So far, July has been very good to Qatalyst. Earlier this month, GoDaddy finally announced plans to sell itself to some PE firms for $2.25 billion. Qatalyst advised GoDaddy on that deal. Qatalyst's largest deal this year was Texas Instruments $6.5 billion purchase of National Semiconductor.
The San Francisco investment bank really set tongues a waggin' when it advised 3Par last year. The data storage company was the subject of a highly publicized bidding war between Dell and HP. Dell initially bid $18 a share for 3Par, but HP ultimately "won" the deal when it paid $32 a share, or $2.4 billion.
Advanced Diamond Technologies said Wednesday that it has closed a $5.2 million Series D financing round led by S-Group Capital Management. Advanced Diamond, of Romeoville, Ill., develops diamond films for industrial, electronic, and water treatment applications.
Raising the tax on carried interest is a hot topic again. It’s so hot that we’ve decided to give people until Monday to respond to our weekly question.
President Obama is trying to close what some consider the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund and PE managers to pay a 15 percent capital gains tax rate on performance fee income.
Raising the tax rate on carried interest up to 35% is one of several revenue-generating measures the White House is discussing as it seeks to raise the debt ceiling. The measure is expected to raise $20 billion in revenue over a decade. Republicans, as usual, are against the proposal.
Raising the carried interest tax isn't a new issue. President Obama talked about raising the carried interest tax last year but nothing happened. That might change this year. As of Friday afternoon, roughly 57% of voters do NOT think President Obama will sign legislation to raise the carried interest tax this year. But 43% do think a bill will get passed to increase the tax.
So we want to know:
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Zynga filed Friday for its highly anticipated IPO that could raise as much as $1 billion.
San Francisco-based Zynga, maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, did not reveal how many shares it would sell or their price range. That will come in future filings. The company also did not disclose on what exchange its shares would trade or their ticker.
As expected, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are joint bookrunners on the deal. Other underwriters include BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, J.P Morgan and Allen & Co.