“It’s quick, but not as quick as it sounds,” says a source close to the firm. “The first fund was nearly 75% committed when it closed, so they’re mostly out of money.”

Alinda is targeting $3 billion for the new fund, and is fast approaching that figure. Don’t be surprised if it ends up closer to $5 billion, particularly when one considers that it was only targeting $1 billion the first time around. Citigroup and PTP Securities are serving as placement agents.

Alinda was formed in 2006 by Chris Beale, former global head of project finance at Citigroup (and at Morgan Stanley and CSFB, before that), and other members of his Citigroup team. It has offices in New York and London. You can view its portfolio here.

This is perhaps the single hottest VC-backed company in New England, with contracts to power the upcoming Chevy Volt and some of Daimler’s hybrid buses. It also has a storage grid deal with AES, and for the past two years has supplied batteries to power Black & Decker’s cordless power tools.

2007 revenue was approximately $41.4 million, while it generated around $10.3 million in Q1 2008. It reported $31 million in losses last year, and $13.9 million in Q1 2008.

Backers include North Bridge Venture Partners (13.7% pre-IPO stake), General Electric (12.7%), Motorola (8.5%), Qualcomm (8.8%), Sequoia Capital, CMEA Ventures, FA Technology Ventures, Procter & Gamble, Alliance Capital, OnPoint, Carruth Management, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and board chairman Desh Deshpande.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are co-managing the offering, which could be one of the first real VC-backed homeruns to come out of the cleantech sector.

Scott Kirsner has more…

The Boston Globe reports that Ofer Nemirovsky, a managing director with HarbourVest Partners, is spending $23 million to build a Back Bay manse with 24,000 square feet of living space. Included will be 15 bathrooms, a gymnasium, elevator and office for the “house manager.”

It will be the largest single-family residence within Boston’s city limits, and the competition isn’t even close. Nemirovsky is a noted philanthropist in Boston, but come on: Isn’t this just an embarrassing exercise in extravagance? Let me repeat: 15 bathrooms!

All such homes need a name (kind of like a boat), so feel free to leave your suggestions…

Nemirovsky declined to discuss his project with the Globe, citing his family’s privacy. He focuses on HarbourVest’s investor relations effort, and also has been involved in a series of direct investments.

1. Founders Fund usually invests no more than a few million in a company. Why invest $20 million, when your fund is only $220 million?

Nosek: We obviously have internal caps that we follow… What we do is look at how much a company needs, and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook, because that was how much it needed at the time. A lot of firms were offering more.

2. Most of the companies you back have some sort of Internet angle, which makes sense given your PayPal background. But what do you know about rocket science?

Nosek: The most important aspect for us is the team. Remember, the PayPal founders didn’t have banking experience… Elon has put over $100 million of his own money into this company, and developed both the Kestrel and Merlin engines – which are the first new rocket engines developed in the U.S. in a very long time. When we did due diligence, we wanted to speak with other investors of successful new rockets, but they were all dead.

3. Your announcement of the funding came just days after SpaceX had yet another launch failure. Any worries?

Nosek: No. There are obviously going to be some technical kinks, but they get amplified because rocket science is more binary than would be a technical kink with a website. Either the rocket gets into orbit, or it doesn’t. This team has some very smart people, and they’ll make it work.

Might just be a question of semantics (i.e., what constitutes “venture capital”), but I tend to side with the latter source. Why? Because this current sale is designed to raise up to around $100 million, but 3i’s legacy venture portfolio in the U.S. should be several multiples higher than that.

GCA Savvian is running the auction process for 3i, which
still has around $1.5 billion in global VC investments under management.

* The SEC discovers Twitter.

* Rackspace IPO wrap-up.

* Former Refco president Tone Grant gets 10 years in the slammer.

* David Pauly: Financial cowboys need to be lassoed and corralled. 

* Google: Our AOL investment “may be impaired.”

* Is it time for a Chrysler-Nissan merger?
* Wallstrip on the Summer Olympics:

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Mobile game publishing is a highly competitive space. Still, some marginally successful mobile games based on old television series have been earning around $5 million a year, according to Nielsen Mobile, and that’s one market that LimeLife seems to be chasing. So far this year, the company has developed “Law & Order: Celebrity Betrayal” with NBC Universal and the show’s executive producer, Dick Wolf. For $5 a month, users can comb a crime scene in New York on their phone, then question witnesses and bring the case to the courtroom. Limelife more recently developed a $3-per-month application that invites users to download the recipes of celebrity cook Rachael Ray from her Food Network show.

Limelife has also been developing fee-based mobile applications for magazine publishers, and has already locked down two Time Inc. titles: People and InStyle.

[Update: Looks like the VentureExpert database of Thomson Reuters has steered me wrong in this post. According to its data, LimeLife had raised $27.17 million as of June, across seven rounds: $5.2 million in August 2005, $10 million in March, 2006, $1 million in August 2006, $3.9 million in May 2007, $0.9 million in March of this year, $4.8 million in May, and $1.4 million in June.

Without being specific, LimeLife CEO Kristin McDonnell just informed me that this data is wrong, and that LimeLife has raised a total of $24.75 million to date, including its most recent round of $4.75 million, closed in May.

Asked about Limelife’s newest SEC filing for $6.4 million, dated July 31, McConnell explained that it “was a compilation of the actual round, a rights offering, and warrant conversions, so that’s why it appears to be for more than $4.75MM.”

Sorry, Limelife. Maybe I should spend more time playing with my phone applications and less time looking at filings.]

According to a new regulatory filing, Osage Venture Partners, a venture firm in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., recently made a $3 million bridge loan to RedLasso, a startup in King of Prussia, Pa.

It might have done better backing pork bellies. RedLasso is a multimedia search company that was hoping to let bloggers find and syndicate television and radio clips. The idea was “to create value and share income in the form of advertising revenue for and between producers/creators/owners of multimedia and those who can create interest in content.”

The optimistic founders underestimated the degree to which traditional media hates being appropriated, especially without its consent. I just discovered this letter at the site:

To Our Loyal Users:

We would like to thank you for your continued support of Redlasso. You have been essential to making Redlasso a household name online. Unfortunately, due to the legal actions taken against Redlasso by two networks, we are left with no alternative but to suspend access to our video search and clipping Beta site FOR THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE. The networks have provided a big blow to the blogger community’s right to exercise the first amendment and comment on newsworthy events. It is anti-Web. During this service suspension, we will continue our conversations with content providers, with the goal of establishing formal partnerships that will quickly help us restore access to the Beta site.

Several regional newspapers, including the Rocky Mountain News, are reporting that Maveron, the venture capital firm co-founded by beleaguered Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz, just ponied up $16 million in NextFoods, an organic and natural food company in Boulder. Among the company’s newest products is GoodBelly, advertised as a “a fruit-based, dairy-free probiotic product” that ostensibly eases digestion and boosts immunity. (Mmm, hmm. I don’t know about you, but I just grew might thirsty!)

Maveron, which raised its last big ($200 million) fund in 2004, has never invested strictly in tech startups. Among its non-tech consumer investments are Potbelly Sandwich Works and a company that was acquired last year, Lucy Activewear, a chain of women’s fitness and apparel stores.

The deal more caught my attention because I’m seeing more and more of these “consumer wellness” investments, and a growing number of VCs has been telling me that they’re watching the space, and looking for opportunities. Longer term, I think that interest makes sense. I am wondering how the consumer wellness industry is going to fare over the next couple of years, though, as people feeling the recession’s impact make do with less complicated and more affordable options.

The firm announced this morning that it has formed a dedicated cleantech investment group, but did not mention the fund. It will be led by James Kiggen, who previously focused on growth-stage and late-stage cleantech deals for AllianceBernstein. For example, he worked on A123Systems and Powerspan. The Blackstone fund will follow a similar model  which is more venture capital than buyout — with average investments of between $30 million and $50 million.
peHUB had reported back in May that Blackstone may begin raising industry sector-specific funds.

A firm spokesman declined comment.