Good morning! Private-equity fundraising slowed down in recent years, but not all firms have had difficulty raising fresh capital, as two of today's top stories show.

Buyout pioneer THL Partners banked $6.35 billion for its latest flagship fund, surpassing its initial goal, WSJ Pro’s Chris Cumming reports.

Meanwhile, TPG sees current market turmoil as a good moment to deploy the $73 billion the asset manager has available to invest, my other colleague Maria Armental writes.

And our Isaac Taylor reports on Ares Management’s nearly $30 billion quarterly fundraising record.

We have those stories and more news below, so please read on…

Leveraged buyout pioneer THL Partners, founded over five decades ago, has closed its tenth flagship fund to invest in high-growth midmarket companies, Chris Cumming reports for WSJ Pro. The vehicle, THL Equity Fund X, closed at $6.35 billion, above the $6.25 billion fundraising target, the Boston firm said Monday. The sum also exceeds the $5.6 billion THL Partners raised for its ninth flagship vehicle, which closed in 2021. THL benefitted from recent asset sales that helped it stand out at a time when many investors are hamstrung by a lack of cash distributions, said Co-Chief Executive Todd Abbrecht.

Private-markets firm TPG wants to capitalize on market turmoil with nearly $73 billion ready to invest, but it also is looking for opportunities to sell earlier investments as the industry confronts swollen backlogs that have strained fundraising, Maria Armental and Connor Hart write. Overall, TPG generated about $8.7 billion from investment sales in the quarter, more than double the year-ago period and well ahead of the $4.8 billion generated in the fourth quarter. The firm also nearly doubled the amount it invested in the first quarter to $14.37 billion compared with $7.35 billion a year earlier.

Credit-focused Ares Management reported higher revenue and said it achieved record first-quarter fundraising, Isaac Taylor and Nicholas Miller write for WSJ Pro. The firm raised nearly $30 billion in the first quarter, up 45% from the same period a year ago and a record for the company. The fundraising tally included $9.5 billion of new capital for the firm’s U.S. direct-lending business, of which $5.9 billion was raised by its business-development companies.

Apollo Global Management's sports investment strategy led a $225 million growth investment in Pickleball lnc., which oversees events, retailing and software applications used to manage tournaments as well as a video channel devoted to pickleball, company Chief Executive Connor Pardoe said in a LinkedIn post. The deal values the business at about $750 million. Billionaire Tom Dundon's Dundon Capital Partners joined in the deal, which leaves Pardoe and Dundon as majority shareholders, according to a CNBC report linked in Pardoe's post.

RedBird Capital Partners in New York won approval for a five-year credit deal worth over $500 million from leaders of the 16 U.S. colleges and universities that are part of the Big 12 football conference, according to reports posted on the firm's website. Weatherford Capital is also reportedly participating. The deal calls for RedBird to hand the conference $12.5 million to invest in revenue generation and offers up to $30 million in credit at a 10% interest rate to each school, according to an analysis by Giles Beal of law firm Jones Walker in New Orleans. RedBird will get a slice of profits from Big 12 events in return for its role as a business development facilitator.

Searchlight Capital Partners is joining Providence Equity Partners as an investor in business events company CloserStill Media, which Providence has backed since 2018, according to an emailed news release. The two firms will share control of the London-based business as it seeks to expand into new markets and industries. The announcement follows a recent report by Reuters News that Apax Partners was among the frontrunners to acquire the events company.

New investor Centerbridge Partners, joined by existing backers including Vitruvian Partners and 83North, is participating in a roughly £550 million, or about $746.7 million, growth investment in cross-border payments and trade technology company Ebury. Spain's Banco Santander, Ebury's majority owner, is also involved, investing £50 million and still owns about 55% of the business. Ebury has more than 27,000 corporate clients and operates in 30 regulated markets.

Family-backed investment firm Hoffmann Family of Companies is buying Leo Events, an events agency based in Memphis, Tenn. Leo Events’ principals Cindy Brewer, Kent Underwood and Kevin Brewer will retain a minority stake in the business.

Carve-out investor Inspirit Capital in London has acquired the Kaplan Languages Group from its corporate parent, which has licensed its Kaplan name to the newly independent business. The group includes Alpadia Language Schools, Azurlingua and ESL Education. Kaplan is a unit of New York-listed Graham Holdings.

Archimed is taking private Esperion Therapeutics through a deal valued at as much as $1.1 billion, including future performance-based payments, Robb M. Stewart reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The firm is offering current investors $3.16 a share in cash, representing a 58% premium to Thursday's close. Investors will also get rights to participate in future payments of up to $100 million. Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Esperion is a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on cardiovascular disease, among other conditions.

Lone Star Funds has acquired chemicals and polymers company RadiciGroup and is also buying a unit of Domo Group to form a single business serving industries including automotive and construction.

Our add-on deal interactive tool allows you to sort and analyze volumes of add-on deal data compiled by WSJ Pro. View more.

Backers including Novo Holdings and F-Prime Capital Partners saw Avalyn Pharma shares jump almost 64% in their trading debut Thursday, closing at $29.49 each after the issue priced at $18 a share, the top of the expected range. As of Thursday's close, the company had a market capitalization of over $1.23 billion. Novo had a roughly 13% stake in the Boston-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapies for respiratory ailments, a registration filing shows. F-Prime had about 9.1% of the shares. Other significant pre-IPO investors included Wellington Management and Norwest Venture Partners.

Seaport Therapeutics, whose backers include General Atlantic and Sofinnova Investments, priced its initial public offering at $18 a share, the top of the expected range to raise $254.9 million, and rose about 10% in its trading debut Friday. General Atlantic had about 8.6% of the Boston-based company's shares before the IPO, while Sofinnova had 7%, a regulatory filing shows. Neither firm was expected to sell any of its shares in the offering. Seaport is a clinical-stage therapeutics company focused on treatments for debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders.

Actera Group, a private-equity firm focused on investing in Turkey, is selling its nearly 40% stake in building and property manager ISS Türkiye to controlling shareholder ISS Group, a workplace experience and facility services company with over 325,000 employees worldwide. Actera became an investor in the Turkish business, which has over 43,500 employees and nearly 1,000 large customers, in 2021.

Specialist investor Stonepeak has collected nearly $702.1 million so far for a pool tailored to individual investors, Stonepeak-Plus Infrastructure Fund, and a related fund, a regulatory filing shows. The New York-based firm said when it registered the new perpetual vehicle in late 2024 that it would mostly invest in or alongside its other funds and would include monthly subscription and periodic redemption options. The firm said Friday that so far 127 investors have made commitments to the pool.

Credit-focused Marathon Asset Management in New York, which is being acquired by CVC Capital Partners, has brought in about $681.2 million so far for its Marathon Asset-Based Lending Fund IV, listing 123 investors in the vehicle. Among backers of the fund, the Wayne County Employees' Retirement System committed $15 million in October, according to the WSJ Pro Private Equity LP Commitments database. Blackstone made a minority investment in Marathon earlier, regulatory filings show.

Clearlake Capital co-founder and Managing Partner José Feliciano and his wife Kwanza Jones clinched a deal to buy the San Diego Padres franchise of Major League Baseball, which still has to approve the sale at a reported $3.9 billion valuation, a record. A group led by Jones and Feliciano vowed to bring home a World Series championship as stewards of the team, which the late Pete Seidler and a business partner bought for $800 million in 2012. The team has reached post-season play in four of the past six years and has one of the highest attendance records in baseball.

Centerview Partners co-founder Blair Effron, Warburg Pincus chairman and former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Blackstone Vice Chairman Tom Nides are part of a Wall Street group that has recently held private listening sessions with potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, the Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter. One of the goals for some of the organizers is for a younger generation of financiers to have the chance to meet with candidates and for them to potentially help raise campaign cash. The group has been meeting since late last year to discuss the 2028 Democratic field.

Christopher Ullman, former longtime communications head at the Carlyle Group, has made a name for himself as a champion whistler, once performing for a U.S. president, the Tonight Show and at a recent Baltimore Orioles’ baseball game, WSJ Pro’s Becky Yerak writes for the Journal. Now he has his sights set on what he sees as the final box of an award-winning career: whistling the national anthem at an NFL game.

Coatue Management, Philippe Laffont’s $70 billion investment firm, known for big bets on technology stocks and startups, has set up a venture to buy land that will be developed for artificial intelligence  data centers, the Journal reports, citing people familiar with the matter. Tens of billions of dollars could be spent on the effort, the people said.

Spirit Airlines is preparing to cease operations. As the Journal reports, the ailing budget airline had been hoping to finalize a $500 million lifeline from the government before running out of cash.  The discount carrier hasn’t been able to get sufficient support between certain bondholders and the government to secure the funding to keep it in business, people familiar with the matter said. Castlelake had been in talks to potentially acquire the airline, according to press reports earlier this year.

Business development companies are more loaded with debt than they used to be, often in ways that are hard to discern, Jonathan Weil writes for the Journal's Heard on the Street column. A decade ago, federal law capped leverage at BDCs, generally holding them to borrowing no more than $100 for every $100 of equity they held. But in 2018, the limit was raised to two times equity, though special rules let them work around the leverage caps. Reported debt at publicly traded BDCs on average was 1.2 times equity, according to a March report by Octus, which estimated it was actually 1.5 times, including debt at portfolio companies, and as much as 3 times equity or more in some BDCs.

Inflexion has acquired a minority stake in Marktlink Capital, an investment services company that provides access to private markets, Sebastian McCarthy reports for sister publication Private Equity News in London. The firm is investing through its Partnership Capital III fund. Amsterdam-based Marktlink Capital offers access to private equity, venture capital and private credit funds across Europe and North America by pooling capital through fund-of-funds and feeder vehicles.

Send us your tips, suggestions and feedback. Write to:

Maria Armental; Ted Bunker; Chris Cumming; Luis Garcia; Laura Kreutzer; Isaac Taylor; Chitra Vemuri.