Filed under: Raising money, Warburg Pincus, Private equity industry, Investments

Warburg Pincus has recently announced the closing of a $15 billion global private equity fund, Warburg Pincus Private Equity X. Many existing investors increased funds to WP X and includes various investors such as public and private pension funds, endowments, and global financial institutions such as Washington Say Investment Board and GE Asset Management.

Warburg Pincus currently manages over $35 billion in assets globally. The global fund will focus on businesses in any growth stage in core industries in North America, Europe, and Asia. The company invests across geographies, industries, and business growth stages from a single global fund, always with a focus on growing businesses and growing regions.

They’ve significant experience in consumer and retail, energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, industrial, technology, media and telecommunications. Typically, Warburg provides funding for the creation of business or to expand them where long run growth and sustainability is a central factor.

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Filed under: Raising money, Morgan Stanley Capital Partners, Engagements, Investments

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) looks like they are getting busy on the private equity side, while others are not.

The investment banking, brokerage, and private equity firm plans to launch a private equity unit in India Might 1, using funds from its Asia-specific private equity fund for $1.5 billion that shut last year. Reuters has reported that the unit will be managed by Aluri Srinivasa Rao. Previously, he worked at ICICI Venture of ICICI Bank, India’s No. 2 lender. Morgan Stanley already has an investment bank and an asset management firm in operation in India, and the private equity growth in India is a response to India’s rapid economic growth and opportunities. The report also noted that The Say Bank of India reportedly is in talks with multiple foreign firms to start private equity funds in India.

Morgan Stanley’s real estate fund, Special Situations Fund III, finished its third offering in a report by MarketWatch raising $2.5 billion. Most funding came from foreign investors. The completion of this fund brings the total Special Situation funding to $5.9 billion.

Raising “funds” isn’t necessarily the same as entering deals, but generally the latter follows suit for a portion of the funds.

Jon C. Ogg is the editor of the Special Situations newsletter for 247WallSt.com.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn’t particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.

It’s likely that Twitter will roll out English ads at some point. The site has no other source of revenue. But whenever you roll out an ad-free service and then start placing display ads on the interface, people will complain. So it’s probably a smart move to include advertisements from the get go in Japan.

In other news, an apparent Twitter privacy breach turned out to be a bit of a false alarm. But only a bit. Blogger and Twitter user Orli Yakuel discovered that many of her Twitter direct messages, which were supposed to be private communications between two users, were showing up on her public timeline. This is basically the same thing as posting your private emails on your blog. Not good.

It turns out that Twitter probably wasn’t responsible. Rather, Orli was testing a new service called GroupTweet, and entered her account info instead of setting up a new account. But this raises another issue. There are a huge number of third celebration tools for Twitter. And many require you to enter your login information. While we’ve been pretty happy to do this in the past, figuring the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we’d delete our account, the possibility of our private messages being made public hadn’t really occurred to us. There really needs to be a superior way for third party applications to access your Twitter data without requiring your username and password.

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