Good morning! We bring you three scoops to open up a holiday-shortened week.

The first comes with a touch of Hollywood, where dreams are made, or so it's said. Paine Schwartz has invested in BERO, a nonalcoholic beer brand launched by British actor and “Spider-Man” star Tom Holland, our Maria Armental writes.

Also, our bureau chief Laura Kreutzer reports on the $333 million Blueprint Equity has amassed for a fund so coveted that the growth-equity firm had to turn away investors.

Finally, Bansk Group raised $1.4 billion for a continuation fund to extend its hold on Arcadia Consumer Healthcare, our colleague Chris Cumming writes.

Now onto the news ...

Private-equity firm Paine Schwartz Partners is backing BERO, a nonalcoholic beer brand launched by British actor and “Spider-Man” star Tom Holland, Maria Armental reports for WSJ Pro. A person familiar with the transaction said it values New York-based BERO at more than $100 million and will help support the brand’s ambitious growth plans. In backing BERO, the food and beverage-focused firm aims to capitalize on the steady growth in sales of alcohol-free drinks, particularly non-alcoholic beer.

Blueprint Equity has quietly built a reputation among institutional investors that has enabled the growth-equity firm to wrap up its third and largest fund with $333 million, WSJ Pro's Laura Kreutzer writes. The new vehicle drew so many investors that some were turned away and commitments from others were capped, according to both Blueprint and investors. The La Jolla, Calif.-based firm’s final tally for Blueprint Equity Fund III exceeded a $300 million target. Investors included asset managers Accolade Partners, Makena Capital Management and Horsley Bridge Partners, as well as the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Emory University and University of Chicago endowments.

Private-equity investor Bansk Group raised $1.4 billion to support portfolio company Arcadia Consumer Healthcare, aiming to give the maker of over-the-counter medicines and supplements fuel for more acquisitions, WSJ Pro's Chris Cumming reports. Bansk, an investor in consumer brands, attracted a slate of asset managers to back the single-asset continuation fund, the New York firm’s first. Co-lead investors were London-based secondaries firm Coller Capital and publicly traded private-credit giant Ares Management, Bansk said Tuesday. Other investors included BlackRock, Churchill Asset Management, Dextra Partners and Future Standard.

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TriArtisan Capital Advisors and Treville Capital Group, joined by franchise operator Yadav Enterprises, have taken the Denny's restaurant chain private in a $322 million deal announced in November. TriArtisan put a different chain, TGI Friday's, into bankruptcy about a year before the Denny's transaction was disclosed. Investors in Denny's got $6.25 a share in cash in the latest deal. Denny's had about 550 stores and an enterprise value of $620 million when the buyout was agreed.

Midmarket private-equity firm Kinderhook Industries has raised more than $400 million in fresh capital for a single-asset continuation fund backing services provider Ecowaste Solutions, which was created through the combination of Kinderhook portfolio companies Live Oak Environmental and Cards Recycling. The transaction gave limited partners in the investment vehicles backing both companies the option of cashing out or re-investing. Kinderhook Fund 8 and investments from the alternatives arm of Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management's secondaries strategy anchored the deal.

Eurazeo in Paris led a €192 million, or roughly $223.6 million, financing for Terralayr, a developer of grid-scale battery energy storage systems, investing alongside Rive Private Investment and others. Eurazeo is investing from its transition infrastructure fund.

Stone Point Capital has entered exclusive talks to acquire wealth management firm Amber River, although there is no guarantee of a deal, Sebastian McCarthy writes for sister publication Private Equity News, citing people familiar with the matter.

FitzWalter Capital is weighing an increased offer for London-listed Auction Technology Group that would value the company at £491 million, or about $657.1 million, or 400 pence a share. ATG has steadfastly spurned the firm's earlier approaches, however. Shares of ATG surged nearly 13% following disclosure of FitzWalter's potential bid, rising to close at 362 pence Friday.

Dragoneer Investment Group in San Francisco led a $400 million growth investment in database management system developer ClickHouse, joined by Singapore's GIC as well as several other firms. The San Francisco company is using some of the fresh capital to acquire large-language model business Langfuse, a Berlin company whose system is built on ClickHouse's database architecture. Langfuse investors have included General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to data provider PitchBook.

SouthWorth Capital Management, a Memphis, Tenn.-based family office investment firm, has acquired American Furniture Manufacturing, an Ecru, Miss.-based furniture manufacturer focused on upholstered, residential furniture.

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

Eurazeo in Paris and founder of perfumes purveyor Ex Nihilo are selling the company to consumer-focused L Catterton in Greenwich, Conn. Eurazeo first backed the French business about two years ago and expects the deal to generate a return of about 2.5 times its initial investment. While Eurazeo is completely exiting Ex Nihilo through the deal, the founders are making a significant reinvestment in the business.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, RedBird Capital Partners and Aethon Energy Management have agreed to sell U.S. shale businesses Aethon III, Aethon United and related entities to Japan’s Mitsubishi for $5.2 billion, Kosaku Norioka writes for the Journal. The acquisition of shale-gas assets in Texas and Louisiana is the Japanese company’s biggest-ever deal. Ownership of the assets by the Ontario pension, RedBird and Aethon Energy dates back to a joint partnership formed in 2016 to acquire midstream and upstream oil and gas assets from J-W Energy.

Vance Street Capital is selling Victor Sierra Aviation Holdings and Jet Parts Engineering to strategic buyer TransDigm Group for about $2.2 billion in cash, including certain tax benefits, Connor Hart reports for Dow Jones Newswires. The two businesses generated about $280 million in combined revenue in 2025 and have about 700 employees, TransDigm said Friday. Los Angeles-based Vance backed Jet Parts in 2018 and Victor Sierra in 2021.

Bain Capital in Boston is selling the 181-room Cora Resort and Spa in Greece to strategic buyer Fattal Hotel Group after leading a €24 million, or almost $28 million, in investments to makeover the property after initially acquiring it through the firm's special situations strategy. The resort re-opened in 2023.

Blackstone- and General Atlantic-backed app marketing and analytics company Liftoff Mobile has registered for an initial public offering of shares without saying how many it plans to sell or at what expected price range. Blackstone formed the Redwood City, Calif., business through the combination of two portfolio companies in 2021. General Atlantic became a minority investor at a valuation of $4.3 billion under an agreement disclosed in May.

Bain Capital in Boston has collected over $799.6 million so far for its Bain Capital Global Direct Lending Fund, more than doubling the strategy's assets in about a year, regulatory filings show. The firm reported receiving its first commitment to the fund at the end of 2024. Investors include Skypoint Capital's Felicitas Private Markets Fund and credit manager Flat Rock Global's Flat Rock Core Income Fund.

Gerry Cardinale wants to tell you why Paramount is the best buyer for Warner Bros. Discovery, the Journal reports. The head of RedBird Capital Partners and Paramount CEO David Ellison’s close confidant has spent the week in Europe, in part to lobby regulators to back Paramount's bid and reject Netflix’s deal. Cardinale will tell anyone who will listen that Paramount's hostile $77.9 billion offer would create competition and that the streaming giant's $72 billion acquisition of Warner “kills competition.”

Merchant bank BDT MSD Partners is hiring Adam Beshara, who has been a partner at Centerview Partners since 2012, as the firm expands its business advising and investing in founder- and family-owned companies, the Journal reports. Beshara will be one of five presidents at the firm when he starts the job in May, BDT & MSD executives said. Earlier this week, Dina Powell McCormick—another BDT & MSD president—left the firm to become president of Meta Platforms. Former JPMorgan Chase banker Erik Oken, who most recently served as chairman of private equity at investment firm MidOcean Partners, also recently joined BDT & MSD to lead its eastern U.S. operations.

Arctos Partners has named Santiago López-Vilas as an operating partner of the sports investing specialist based in Dallas. He is a former chief executive of Real Madrid Estadio, which redeveloped the over 83,000-seat home of the Real Madrid soccer team in Spain, where he was deputy general manager as well.

Private markets have drawn increasing interest from JPMorgan Chase and now it is building out a new team inside its investment bank to help companies raise capital as an alternative to going public, a sign that America’s biggest bank thinks the private markets will remain dominant even with some mega IPOs expected later this year, Alexander Saeedy reports for the Journal. As more companies opt to raise money from big investors and remain private longer, private-equity firms have been extending their holding periods of assets, often transferring them into new “secondary” funds, with both trends depressing IPOs.

European private markets firm CVC Capital Partners has formed a partnership with American International Group that will see AIG serve as a cornerstone investor in a new evergreen private-equity secondary platform at CVC, Megan Cheah reports for Dow Jones Newswires. AIG is pledging up to $1.5 billion of its own private-equity portfolio to seed the new program. AIG also plans to allocate up to $2 billion, including an initial $1 billion to be deployed through 2026, to CVC’s credit unit across commingled funds as well as separately managed accounts.

In the new era of paid athletes and private-equity dealmaking, interest in college football is soaring—and so are the valuations, Andrew Beaton reports for the Journal. The University of Texas at Austin ranks No. 1 in team values at a $2.2 billion valuation, according to an annual analysis by Ryan Brewer, an associate professor of finance at Indiana University Columbus. Ohio State is second at $1.5 billion.  Brewer’s study examines industry trends, cash flows, revenue and broader economic shifts to calculate what every team would be worth if it could be bought and sold on the open market—just like a professional sports franchise.

A challenge against Intel's inclusion of private-equity investments in its 401(k) retirement savings plan for workers will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, the court said on Friday. The move came months after a lower appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of Intel, one of the early adopters of private funds in its 401(k) plan. But the challenge from plan participant Winston Anderson over higher investment fees and risks gained new life with the high court's decision to review the case.

Private funds won't be allowed into the roughly $1.5 billion 401(k) plan sponsored by manufacturer RPM International, the company's chief executive,  Frank Sullivan, tells the Journal's Jason Zweig, citing the frustration he encountered in trying to untangle his late father's estate. Since August 2024, Sullivan has been struggling to transfer ownership of several private-equity funds from his father’s name to himself as part of that process.

Leveraged loan activity in the U.S. fell dramatically in the first two weeks of the year, as London Stock Exchange Group data show a 57% drop to just 17 deals totalling $11.7 billion this month through Jan. 15 compared with the same period of last year. The decline came after interest rate cuts put pressure on margins last year.

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

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