Blue Pool Capital Raises $1 Billion for First Private-Equity Fund
Hong Kong firm, which also runs Joe Tsai’s family office, bucks tough fundraising environment
Hong Kong investment firm Blue Pool Capital raised $1 billion for Riverside, its first private-equity fund, amid a challenging fundraising environment.
Blue Pool Capital, led by Chief Executive Oliver Weisberg, also manages the family office and operating assets of Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai.
The firm’s multistrategy fund’s private-equity strategy had an estimated gross internal rate of return of 55% for the decade ended Dec. 31, 2025.
Hong Kong investment firm Blue Pool Capital has raised $1 billion for its first private-equity fund, according to people familiar with the firm, a significant haul in a tough fundraising environment for the sector. Blue Pool also runs the family office and operating assets of Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai.
Under Chief Executive Oliver Weisberg, Blue Pool has been a private-equity investor for a decade out of a multistrategy fund that counts as investors Tsai, Weisberg and a handful of former Alibaba executives. Its portfolio companies have included the luxury sneaker-maker Golden Goose, SpaceX, “Fortnite” videogame developer Epic Games and TikTok parent ByteDance, according to a fundraising document viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
One of its most profitable investments was in the management company of the private credit firm Blue Owl, which it exited several years ago. Blue Owl recently has come under pressure.
Historically, select investors could invest alongside Blue Pool’s flagship fund in specific private-equity deals. But Blue Pool started to get access to deals that were too big for its multistrategy fund to pursue, one of the people said, kicking off discussions around raising a stand-alone private-equity fund.
Blue Pool closed on a $1 billion capital raise for that fund, Riverside, earlier this week. Weisberg and his team are the largest investors in Riverside. The fund is expected to invest in fast-growing consumer businesses globally.
Weisberg and a separate team at Blue Pool run Tsai’s family office and the Tsai family’s operating assets, which include the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, Barclays Center and European vineyards. Forbes estimated Tsai’s net worth at $12.7 billion as of Friday.
The fundraising document said that for the decade ended Dec. 31, 2025, the multistrategy fund’s private-equity strategy had an estimated gross internal rate of return of 55% which, after fees, would place it among the top decile of funds launched in 2016, according to PitchBook data.
Fundraising in private equity has fallen off in recent years from a 2021 peak. A lack of distributions, or money returned to investors in private-equity funds, has been a key factor, as many investors use those distributions to fund new private-equity commitments. That dynamic also has contributed to investors becoming overly weighted in private equity, causing many to look to trim rather than add to their exposure. Higher interest rates have slowed distributions because they have made it harder for managers to get the prices they’d hoped for when they look to sell portfolio companies.
Weisberg moved to Hong Kong in the 1990s from the U.S. He worked in Goldman Sachs’s Asian special situations and principal investment divisions before moving to Citadel. He met Tsai while at Goldman, where he negotiated the Series A term sheet for Goldman’s investment in the then-fledgling Alibaba with Tsai and Jack Ma, and was Goldman’s director on Alibaba’s board.
He joined Blue Pool from Citadel in 2015 and restructured it, taking a cue from the early path of Michael Dell’s MSD Capital. MSD began as the billionaire computer pioneer’s family office; it eventually raised money from outside investors, with that part of the business becoming MSD Partners. (Today, MSD Partners is part of the investment and advisory firm BDT & MSD Partners.)