The raise comes less than a year after HarbourVest formally built out the strategy. In October 2025 the firm set up a dedicated credit secondaries team, co-led by Greg Ciesielski from its secondaries group and Sean Gillespie from its credit team, covering both LP-led and GP-led deals. At the time, HarbourVest said the private credit market passed $1.6 trillion in 2024 and credit secondary volumes reached $10 billion, up from $3 billion in 2020. Only $6.8 billion of global secondaries dry powder was allocated to credit. The new fund alone equals more than a third of that figure.

“We believe credit secondaries will be one of the fastest-growing segments of the secondaries market over the next several years,” CEO John Toomey said when the team launched.

Credit is the newest leg of one of the oldest secondaries franchises in the market. HarbourVest made its first secondary investment in 1986 and has completed more than 500 transactions since. The firm reports more than $83 billion committed to secondaries as of June 30, 2026. Its flagship Dover Street XI closed at $15.1 billion in August 2024, alongside the $3.4 billion Secondary Overflow Fund V. HarbourVest has not yet announced a close for the successor, Dover Street XII, which counts Taiwan’s Fubon Life among its investors, according to Private Equity International.

The firm has also been splitting the franchise into specialist pools. In January it closed HarbourVest Partners Structured Solutions 2025, a $1.1 billion vehicle for diversified private equity and private credit secondaries, capitalised alongside Ares Alternative Credit funds with senior financing from Blackstone Credit & Insurance. In February its inaugural Private Equity Continuation Solutions fund closed at $1.1 billion to back single-asset continuation vehicles. At $2.4 billion, the credit vehicle is the largest of the three specialist secondaries pools HarbourVest has disclosed this year.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal; Dealroom; HarbourVest Partners, "HarbourVest Partners Expands Credit Secondaries Platform" (October 9, 2025); HarbourVest Partners, Secondary Investments strategy page; HarbourVest Partners, "HarbourVest Partners Closes Latest Secondaries Funds at Record $18.5 Billion" (August 16, 2024); Private Equity International; HarbourVest Partners, "HarbourVest Partners Closes Structured Solutions Vehicle for Private Market Secondaries" (January 27, 2026); HarbourVest Partners, "HarbourVest Partners Closes Inaugural Private Equity Continuation Solutions (PECS) Fund at $1.1 Billion" (February 17, 2026); ION Analytics (Mergermarket).

The fund-of-funds tell

IPEM Global 2026, the report’s underlying event, draws LPs and GPs from across private equity, venture, private debt, and real assets, a much broader constituency than the secondaries specialists Secondary Scoop usually cites. That’s what makes one line in the report worth pulling out on its own. Discussing why fund-of-funds appetite is climbing “in every asset class,” the report’s authors reach for a direct comparison:

“Fund-of-funds interest is rising in every asset class. These offer access to niche parts of the market, such as emerging managers and smaller funds, two areas LPs are moving towards. Notably, secondaries showed the same broad-based climb in this report, two years before becoming a mainstream allocation.”

IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027

Read plainly, IPEM and AlixPartners are using secondaries’ own adoption curve, as measured in their own past surveys, as the reference case for what “about to go mainstream” looks like in the data. That’s a stronger endorsement of secondaries’ normalization than most secondaries-specific research can offer, precisely because the authors aren’t secondaries advisors with a platform to promote. It’s the kind of third-party validation this publication has flagged before as more persuasive than another bank’s own secondary-market review: a macro-oriented survey reaching for secondaries as its own case study of what mainstreaming looks like.

Secondaries’ footprint in the fundraising market keeps widening

On the supply side, the report finds that secondaries vehicles now account for 18% of private equity funds currently in market, a growing slice of the products GPs are bringing to LPs, in a year where the report’s authors describe fundraising timelines as continuing to lengthen and manager size skewing larger even as fund sizes stay resolutely mid-market. Funds of funds sit at 10% of in-market PE vehicles, while co-investment funds have eased to 25% of the total, evidence that LPs’ appetite for co-investment is increasingly being met through direct allocation and separate accounts rather than commingled co-investment vehicles.

Demand-side data points in the same direction. Emerging-manager appetite, the search for alpha that is also feeding new-relationship activity in secondaries, as the breakdown below shows, has risen sharply: 88% of LPs say they will back funds I through III in the next 12 months, up from 65% last year, and 64% are open to backing a first-time fund outright. IPEM cites a National Association of Investment Companies study finding diverse and emerging manager programs have added 700 basis points of outperformance relative to their peers, a data point worth citing directly given its source.

Who’s writing new checks in secondaries, and who isn’t

The report’s most granular secondaries data comes from a breakdown of re-up versus new-relationship commitments, tracked separately across sixteen private-markets strategies in four asset classes. Secondaries appears in all four, and the pattern differs sharply by asset class.

Figures show the share of LP commitments to secondaries strategies going to existing (”re-up”) versus new manager relationships, and the year-on-year percentage-point change in the “new” share. Source: IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027, Figure 5.

In PE, VC, and private debt, secondaries is sitting close to its asset class’s overall average split between re-ups and new relationships (roughly 49/51 in each), meaning the strategy isn’t losing its ability to bring LPs into new manager relationships even as allocators tighten their broader manager rosters. Real assets secondaries is the outlier: the swing toward re-ups is the single largest year-on-year move recorded anywhere in the report’s re-up/new breakdown, outpacing even fund-of-funds strategies in private debt and venture. LPs writing checks into real assets secondaries this year are concentrating that capital with managers they already know, even as overall infrastructure appetite stays exceptionally strong, 79% of LPs surveyed are looking at the asset class. Whether that reflects a thinner bench of established real assets secondaries managers, capacity constraints among the specialists who exist, or simply fewer new entrants with a long enough track record to court re-up-focused allocators is a question this publication plans to keep an eye on.

“LPs are concentrating re-up capital on a select few existing managers as they continue to rationalize GP relationships. New managers are being sought in segments where allocators see the potential for alpha generation, and interest in emerging managers continues to support the trend towards new commitments.”

Nicolas Beaugrand, France PE & ESG Lead, Partner & Managing Director, AlixPartners

RE-UP VS. NEW, DEFINED

A “re-up” is a commitment to a manager an LP has backed before, typically a successor fund from an existing relationship. A “new” commitment goes to a manager the LP has not previously invested with — the metric IPEM and AlixPartners use as a proxy for how much of the market’s capital is chasing fresh relationships versus consolidating around known names.

Where the appetite is actually cracking: technology

The report’s single largest sector movement has nothing to do with returns expectations or fund size — it’s a near-total reversal in LP interest in technology and software. Last year, 85% of LPs answering the sector question named it an area of interest for the coming 12 months. This year, that figure is 28%, moving technology and software from first place to last among the eight sectors IPEM tracks. And the report draws an explicit line from that shift to the secondaries market itself:

“As another indication of the lack of appetite for software, secondaries brokers are reporting buyers moving away from technology, and pricing weakening as a result.”

IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027

That single sentence is an independent, non-secondaries-specialist confirmation of the thread this publication ran to its capstone in August: Campbell Lutyens’ data showing software’s share of GP-led continuation-vehicle volume collapsing from 20% to 6% year-on-year, Lazard’s buyer-survey mechanics on repricing and bid-ask widening, and Ducera’s credit-pricing evidence of software loans trading down and going distressed. IPEM and AlixPartners arrive at the same conclusion from a completely different vantage point — LP registration data and broker conversations gathered for a conference, not a secondaries deal-flow database — which is exactly the kind of corroboration that turns a sector story into a market consensus.

The nuance matters, though. GPs haven’t repriced their own view of the sector: technology and software remains GPs’ most-cited sector strength at 65%, and the leading sector focus among in-market funds at 56%, running at roughly twice LP demand, the only genuinely oversupplied sector in the entire dataset. And within technology as a capability rather than a sector label, appetite hasn’t gone anywhere: artificial intelligence remains the most sought-after technology theme among LPs, at 78% and still rising, alongside gains in deep tech and fintech. The rotation is out of software as a standalone sector bet, not out of AI-driven value creation.

“I think people are actually moving away from software, but more into software-oriented services. So, these implementer ecosystems have become very popular.”

Global asset manager, quoted in the report

Capital that’s rotating out of pure software is landing in industrials and materials (up to 73% LP interest), business services (72%), and healthcare, which at 83% now leads every sector tracked, the same rotation into “AI adoption inside conventional businesses, rather than exposure to technology as an asset class” that the report’s authors describe directly.

That timing isn’t incidental. 2026 is the year private credit stress went from whispered concern to front-page material: the anniversary of the First Brands and Tricolor bankruptcies, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon reviving his now-famous line about “cockroaches” in credit, the Bank of England opening an inquiry into systemic private credit risk, and August data showing troubled loans at some of the largest private debt investors sitting at levels last seen in 2017.

It’s a boom built on that very tension. Evercore put H1 2026 private credit secondaries volume at $20bn, already exceeding all of FY2025, with roughly $31bn of dedicated dry powder still waiting to deploy, and GP-led deals (managers recycling their own balance sheets rather than distressed LPs dumping stakes) now the dominant share of that flow. Which makes it worth noting who’s actually supplying that liquidity: nearly every headline credit-secondaries deal of the past few months: Ares, Jefferies, Bridgepoint, Willow Tree, GCM Grosvenor, has been a US lender recycling its own book, bought by a small cluster of mostly American specialist buyers (Pantheon, Coller, HarbourVest). Tikehau is the outlier in that lineup: a French-founded, Paris-listed platform whose Private Debt Secondaries team happens to sit in New York, giving a European multi-strategy manager genuine standing in a market that otherwise reads like an all-American story.

A credit-native secondaries platform, not a PE one

It’s worth being precise about what Tikehau actually does here, because the label “secondaries” gets applied loosely across private markets. Tikehau’s platform is private credit secondaries: trading in fund-level and asset-level positions tied to direct lending, corporate credit and other debt strategies, not private equity or venture secondaries. In the appendix of Tikehau’s H1 2026 investor deck, “Credit Secondaries” appears as one of seven listed sub-strategies inside the Credit AUM bucket, alongside direct and corporate lending, CLOs and leveraged loans, special opportunities, multi-asset credit, digital infrastructure, and real estate debt. Tikehau doesn’t break out a standalone AUM or performance figure for the strategy in that disclosure, it wasn’t one of H1 2026’s headline growth stories, which instead centered on the €5.2bn final close of the sixth Direct Lending vintage and two Private Equity flagship raises still in market.

That makes TPDS a useful data point for readers tracking how secondaries capability shows up inside multi-strategy platforms versus dedicated specialists: here, it’s a purpose-built pocket of expertise sitting quietly inside a much larger credit engine, rather than a firm-defining business line.

ORIGINS AND TEAM

The platform was launched in 2019 by Olga Kosters, who joined Tikehau from StepStone Group to build the strategy from scratch (now she is heading Antares Capital credit secondaries, after spending some time at Apollo). It is now led by Pierpaolo Casamento, Head of Private Debt Secondaries, who joined Tikehau in 2016 and relocated to New York in 2019 to run the business, positioning the team to source deal flow across both North America and Europe.

WHAT THE STRATEGY ACTUALLY DOES

TPDS underwrites two flavors of transaction: LP-led purchases of private credit fund positions from investors seeking liquidity, and GP-led deals where the team acquires assets directly from credit fund managers, often restructuring them into new continuation vehicles. Tikehau’s own framing leans away from opportunistic or distressed-liquidity positioning; the firm describes the strategy as a tool for “proactive portfolio management” that helps both LPs and GPs “manage portfolios effectively and anticipate new allocations,” built on relationships across its existing network of GPs, LPs and advisors.

The fund series: from $415m to over $1bn

TPDS’s fundraising trajectory maps a familiar pattern for a young strategy proving itself out before scaling.

TIKEHAU PRIVATE DEBT SECONDARIES FUND SERIES

TPDS II closed more than double the size of its predecessor and comfortably above its $750m target, with roughly half of committed capital already deployed across North America and Europe as of the close. The LP base is notably international for a Tikehau vehicle, institutional investors and family offices spanning Asia, Europe, North America and South America, consistent with the broader diversification of Tikehau’s client base, where non-French investors now make up the majority of Group AUM.

Tikehau signaled the scale-up was coming well before it closed. In an August 2023 interview, the firm was already targeting up to $1bn for the then-upcoming second vehicle and described the strategy as “poised to scale and become a flagship fund”, language that suggests a larger TPDS III is the expected next step in the series, though nothing has been announced.

“We are humbled by the trust our investors have placed in us. This successful raise reflects our track record and credit capabilities and affirms Tikehau Capital’s specialised and differentiated access to the private debt secondaries market.”PIERPAOLO CASAMENTO, HEAD OF PRIVATE DEBT SECONDARIES, TIKEHAU CAPITAL, ON TPDS II’S CLOSE, FEBRUARY 2026

From the earnings call: TPDS gets a direct mention

Tikehau’s July 29 results call adds a data point the slide deck doesn’t spell out: management named TPDS II specifically, on the record, as one of the two closes responsible for this year’s fundraising deceleration. Asked by RBC’s David Pick to unpack a slowing net-new-money run rate, management pointed to base effects from two large 2025 closes rather than any softening in underlying demand:

“In 2025, we had a finalisation of Secondaries [Fund] Number Two in private credit, and then Direct Lending Number Six, which affected mostly H2 2025 and the beginning of 2026… this is roughly the main effect that we’ve gone through over the first semester.”

TIKEHAU CAPITAL MANAGEMENT, H1 2026 EARNINGS CALL Q&A, 29 JULY 2026

That’s a notable pairing. Management is putting TPDS II’s final close in the same sentence, as a fundraising event, as the €5.2bn sixth Direct Lending vintage, the platform’s flagship, headline strategy. It’s the clearest signal yet that, internally at least, the secondaries franchise is being tracked as a genuine contributor to Group fundraising momentum, not a footnote.

ON THE 2026 TARGETS

Citi’s Nicolas Herrmann pushed on a related point: the H1 press release didn’t reiterate Tikehau’s previously stated 2026 targets of €60bn AUM and €175–225m of FRE. Management didn’t walk the targets back, but was careful about how it reaffirmed them, tying continued progress to profitability discipline rather than AUM growth for its own sake, and flagging a “richer macro, fiscal, geopolitical, volatile” backdrop since Tikehau’s February capital markets day as a reason some discussions may simply take longer.

“We are not pursuing growth for growth’s sake… we want to accelerate profitability generation.”

TIKEHAU CAPITAL MANAGEMENT, H1 2026 EARNINGS CALL Q&A

THE RETAILIZATION ASIDE

A question from an analyst about Revolut’s newly announced tie-up with US alternative managers gave Tikehau a chance to flag its own position in the broader push to open private markets to individual investors. Management confirmed Tikehau is a minority shareholder in iCapital, the roughly $200bn US distribution platform for alternative assets, and framed “democratization” of private equity, private debt and infrastructure as a long-term structural trend it intends to keep capturing a share of, while adding a caveat that Tikehau has stayed cautious about building open-ended, retail-facing private credit vehicles specifically, on the view that “the liquidity is not there yet” for that investor base. Worth watching for how that liquidity caution intersects with a firm that also runs a dedicated credit secondaries platform.

THE EDUCATIONAL ANGLE: TWO DIFFERENT “SECONDARY” MARKETS IN ONE CALL

Later in the Q&A, an analyst asked what might unlock more private equity exits in 2026, a more open IPO window, industrial acquirers, or “sales amongst private equity firms in the form of secondary trades.” That’s a useful reminder to keep two markets straight: a secondary buyout (one sponsor selling a portfolio company to another sponsor, an M&A transaction) is a different animal from the secondaries market that TPDS operates in (LP stake sales and GP-led continuation vehicles at the fund level). Management’s answer addressed the former, exit routes for portfolio companies, and had nothing to do with TPDS’s fund-level secondaries business.

Why this fits the bigger Tikehau story right now

Tikehau’s H1 2026 results frame the period as “a major first step in our harvesting phase”, a phrase that shows up twice in the deck, once for the asset management business (profitability inflection, cost discipline) and once for the balance sheet (active portfolio rotation, the Schroders exit generating a €217m capital gain at a 1.65x gross MOIC). Group net result, Group share, doubled year-over-year to €165m on the back of it.

That balance-sheet story and the TPDS story are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. Commentary around Tikehau’s broader positioning this month has framed the firm’s pivot as moving “from volume to margin and portfolio value realization” as primary private equity and credit deal flow contracts industry-wide. TPDS is Tikehau playing that dynamic from the buy side, sourcing secondary positions and continuation deals as primary transaction volume slows, while the Group’s own asset disposals play it from the sell side. Whether or not that connection was explicit in Tikehau’s own messaging, it’s a coherent read of a firm leaning into secondary-market activity on both sides of its business at once.

But scale isn’t the whole story, and it’s not why we’re spending this much time on Eurazeo. It’s the secondaries franchise sitting inside that mid-tier platform, which is genuinely differentiated and, we think, underappreciated relative to what it’s actually doing. That’s the thread this piece follows.

On July 6, 2026, Eurazeo announced the final close of its fifth-generation private equity secondaries programme at €2.3 billion, comfortably clearing its initial €2 billion target and marking a 130% jump over Secondaries IV, which closed at €1 billion back in 2021.

That gap, a firm that lost the continent’s highest-profile fund mandate of the year, but is quietly running one of Europe’s longest-standing and fastest-scaling secondaries franchises, is exactly why we’re dedicating this coverage to Eurazeo’s overall secondaries strategy specifically.

It’s a listed, diversified European investment group spanning private equity, private debt, and real assets, with secondaries sitting as one line inside. It’s “Secondaries & Mandates” business now represents 17% of the Group’s total assets under management, has been operating continuously since 2003, and just posted one of the sharpest single-vintage jumps of any secondaries programme tracked in this newsletter this year.

The close, in the founders’ own words

Eurazeo’s press release names two on-record spokespeople from the Secondaries & Mandates team. Christophe Simon, Managing Partner, framed the raise as validation of a specific market position:

“The closing of our fifth secondaries programme at €2.3 billion marks an important milestone for Eurazeo and a significant step forward in the development of our secondaries platform. The strong increase in commitments reflects the growing recognition of our strategy in the market and the relevance of our differentiated positioning.”

CHRISTOPHE SIMON, MANAGING PARTNER, SECONDARIES & MANDATES, EURAZEO PRESS RELEASE, 6 JULY 2026

Amine Rais, Partner on the same team, was more specific about deployment pace and market conditions:

“The secondary market remains deep and highly dynamic, with attractive opportunities continuing to emerge across Europe. Our disciplined focus on European buyout assets allows us to access resilient, high-quality transactions in a segment where we have long-standing expertise. Against a volatile market backdrop, we are seeing a record level of opportunities, and ESF V is already well into its deployment phase, with approximately 50% invested to date across 22 secondary transactions.”

AMINE RAIS, PARTNER, SECONDARIES & MANDATES, EURAZEO PRESS RELEASE, 6 JULY 2026

That deployment pace is worth sitting with: a fund that closed on July 6 was already roughly half-invested across 22 transactions by the announcement date, meaning the bulk of that capital had gone to work well before the formal close, consistent with what several reports tracked in this newsletter this year describe as evergreen-style deployment cadence blurring into what used to be sequential fundraise-then-invest cycles.

Fund performance: ESF IV vs. ESF V

_{*Fund size shown reflects Eurazeo's H1 2026 selected-funds-performance disclosure (€1,037m), which differs from the €2.3bn total aggregate commitments figure cited in the July close announcement — the latter includes ESF V plus associated co-investment and mandate vehicles. Both figures are Eurazeo's own; the difference is scope, not a discrepancy. Gross IRR/MOIC/DPI figures are early-stage given ESF V's ~49-50% deployment as of mid-2026.}

ESF IV, the 2021 vintage, is fully committed at 109% invested and already showing a 0.4x DPI, real distributions, not just paper markups. ESF V is still in the growth phase of its J-curve, which is exactly what you’d expect roughly a year into deployment. The more useful read here isn’t the early-vintage numbers themselves but the scaling pattern: Eurazeo has now taken its flagship secondaries vehicle from €1.0bn (Secondaries IV) to €2.3bn in aggregate commitments (ESF V and associated vehicles) in a single vintage cycle, a steeper jump than the firm’s own direct lending platform posted over the same period (EPD VI’s €3.2bn to EPD VII’s €5.5bn, +70%), and one of the larger vintage-over-vintage increases logged in this newsletter’s tracking of secondaries fundraises this year.

A small distinction worth getting right

Eurazeo’s H1 2026 results slides also disclose a small legacy line item, confusingly also labeled “Secondaries,” sitting inside the firm’s balance-sheet Buyout portfolio: three investments, €0.1bn in NAV, down 10% in value creation for H1 2026. This is not the same thing as the ESF fund management business. It appears to be a handful of older direct-holding positions carried on Eurazeo’s own balance sheet rather than in a third-party-managed fund, the kind of legacy classification quirk this newsletter has flagged before with other multi-strategy managers (see: 50 South Capital AUM vs. Northern Trust’s total Alternatives Services AUA). Any headline figure citing Eurazeo’s “secondaries” performance should specify which of the two lines it refers to.

The retailization angle: E.P.S.O. joins the evergreen wave

Eurazeo’s H1 2026 fundraising pipeline slide names a new “Eurazeo Prime” evergreen product line built for international wealth-management distribution, structured under SFDR Article 9. Two vehicles sit inside it: E.P.I.C. for private credit, and E.P.S.O. for secondaries, both currently at first-close stage. This sits alongside Eurazeo’s existing flagship evergreen private equity vehicle, EPVE 3, which has surpassed €3.7 billion in AUM with what management describes as “limited redemptions, in line with historical average.”

The pattern tracks directly with what this newsletter has already documented at Partners Group (four-vertical secondaries platform including a 2025 private-credit-secondaries evergreen JV with Generali) and Capital Dynamics (a mid-market secondaries specialist now building out private-wealth distribution alongside its institutional GSEC series). Eurazeo joining that list with E.P.S.O. confirms secondaries-specific evergreen wrappers are becoming standard infrastructure for any manager with a large enough secondaries franchise to retail, not a one-off innovation at any single platform.

The ESG angle: A rare look at GP-Led diligence mechanics

This newsletter’s own research earlier this year found that ESG has largely disappeared as a standalone category in the major secondaries market barometers, Coller’s own 44th-edition Global Private Capital Barometer, for instance, dedicates a full section to liquidity and zombie funds but doesn’t mention ESG at all. The working thesis from that research was that ESG hadn’t gone away so much as gone underground: less marketing language, more embedded mechanics inside actual deal diligence.

Eurazeo’s newly overhauled Responsible Investment Policy (V5, July 2026) is a useful primary-source confirmation of exactly that. It explicitly carves out “Secondaries & Mandates” as a distinct diligence track, separate from the firm’s direct-ownership strategies, with several specific mechanics:

• A different exclusions test. Eurazeo’s standard exclusion policy uses a 20%-of-revenue materiality threshold for restricted sectors. For secondary transactions specifically, that threshold is instead “assessed by transparency”, a look-through basis appropriate to a fund-of-funds structure where Eurazeo doesn’t control the underlying companies directly.

• Exempted from the standard ESG playbook. The policy’s 20-point “O+ Essentials” framework, the operational sustainability checklist applied to majority-controlled portfolio companies, explicitly does not apply to Secondaries & Mandates, reflecting the reality that a fund-of-funds investor has far less operational control than a direct owner.

• A distinct, lighter-touch diligence methodology. Sustainability due diligence for secondaries transactions draws on fund manager documents, DD-phase questionnaires to fund managers, and third-party sector research, rather than the in-depth operational assessments (including external HSE experts, in some cases) used for direct Buyout and Real Assets deals.

• Mandatory GP-led side-letter language. For every GP-led transaction Eurazeo completes, the policy requires sustainability clauses in the legal documentation, covering exclusion-policy compliance, sustainability criteria in the GP’s ongoing selection and monitoring process, incident notification obligations, and annual sustainability reporting. The policy states this in mandatory terms: it is “a prerequisite for the completion of the GP-led transaction.”

Why this matters for the broader thread: most ESG-and-secondaries commentary available publicly comes from law firms and advisors writing in general terms (Ropes & Gray, Malk Partners, Petra Funds Group). Eurazeo’s policy is a rare instance of a GP itself publishing the specific mechanics, down to the exclusions-testing methodology, for how ESG actually gets applied inside its own GP-led secondaries transactions.

Where Eurazeo sits on the Specialist-to-Platform spectrum

_{AUM figures as most recently disclosed by each firm; not all figures are directly comparable given differing reporting conventions and dates (see this newsletter’s ongoing coverage of market-sizing methodology divergence across secondaries reports).}

Eurazeo lands in an interesting middle position on this spectrum. It’s not chasing scale the way Partners Group’s four-vertical build does, nor is it explicitly positioning against the mega-deal market the way Capital Dynamics does; but its 2003 start date, its European mid-market focus, and its now-€6.4bn+ AUM put it closer to a genuine platform than most coverage credits it for. The Christophe Simon quote’s reference to “differentiated positioning” reads, in context, like an implicit nod to exactly this kind of category confusion: Eurazeo isn’t trying to be Coller or Ardian, and the market hasn’t quite worked out where to file it instead.

Some background: A French platform with a two-decade-plus secondaries track record

Eurazeo’s own corporate history predates its private equity identity by well over a century. The firm traces its lineage to two French entities: Eurafrance, an investment holding company founded in 1969, and Gaz et Eaux, a 19th-century water-and-gas utility (founded 1881) that gradually converted into a pure investment vehicle before being renamed Azeo in 1999. The two merged in April 2001 to form Eurazeo, under founding CEO Patrick Sayer, a former Lazard LLC New York executive brought in by the David-Weill family, Lazard’s controlling family at the time, specifically to run the new entity independently of Lazard itself. Eurazeo has traded continuously on Euronext Paris since that 2001 merger, giving it one of the longer public listings among Europe’s large private-markets platforms.

The secondaries business is younger than the parent company but still has real seniority in the market: Eurazeo dates its activity in PE secondaries to 2003. That predates most of the specialist shops that now dominate the secondaries press cycle: Ardian’s fund-of-funds heritage, for instance, only became fully independent from AXA in 2013. Eurazeo’s own materials describe the platform as having closed more than 100 secondary transactions by the time its fourth vintage came to market, with €5.7 billion committed since 2001 across its three connected strategies: primary fund commitments, secondary transactions, and direct equity co-investments.

Christophe Simon, Managing Partner and Head of Secondaries & Mandates, has led the team since joining Eurazeo in 2007, following four years at Ernst & Young’s Audit and Transactions Services practice in New York. He holds a master’s degree in corporate finance and financial engineering from Université Paris-Dauphine. He’s joined by Amine Rais, Partner on the same team, and a broader dedicated Secondaries & Mandates group Eurazeo now sizes at more than 30 professionals, a large dedicated secondaries bench relative to the overall size of the platform.

At an earlier Secondary Fund investor day held at Paris’s Hôtel de Crillon, Simon summarized the team’s positioning in terms that track closely with the messaging around this year’s ESF V close:

“Over the last [years], our ability to build resilient and performing portfolios, firmly anchored in the European mid-market, is what sets us apart. A disciplined, selective and diversified strategy, combining LP-led and GP-led transactions, backed by long-standing relationships with leading managers.”

One structural footnote worth flagging for anyone cross-referencing older Eurazeo materials: the group absorbed Idinvest Partners, a separate French private equity, venture, and private debt platform, into the unified Eurazeo brand in 2018. Idinvest wasn’t a secondaries specialist itself, but the integration is part of how Eurazeo’s broader asset-management platform got built out from a listed holding company into today’s multi-strategy group.

The headline number, and how fast it grew

CVC Secondary Partners, the secondaries arm CVC built by acquiring Glendower Capital, a deal announced in September 2021 and closed in 2022, confirmed the final close of Secondary Opportunities Fund VI (”SOF VI”) on September 3, with aggregate capital commitments of $10 billion. That compares with $5.8 billion for the fifth SOF fund in 2023 and $2.7 billion for the fourth in 2019, according to CVC’s own release. The fundraise drew more than 200 returning and new institutional LPs, with roughly half of the capital coming from investors new to the SOF platform.

The pace of that growth is the real story. As recently as the third quarter of 2026, SOF VI was being tracked in the market at $7 billion, already 38% ahead of its predecessor and reported as a target the fund was on track to top. By CVC’s half-year results in July, the fund had reached $9.3 billion. The final $10 billion print means the fund grew roughly 43% past that original $7 billion marker before closing, a size trajectory this newsletter flagged as one of two “near-record” secondaries closes worth watching back in the August 23 media sweep, alongside Adams Street’s Global Secondary Fund 8.

What SOF VI actually buys. CVC describes the strategy as "two-pronged": LP fund-portfolio secondaries alongside GP-led transactions, targeting buyout fund investments managed by what the firm calls high-quality GPs in the private equity secondaries mid-market. It's explicitly a diversified, balanced-portfolio approach rather than a concentrated single-asset or thematic bet — the same mid-market segment that boutique specialists like Capital Dynamics (covered in this newsletter's August 31 deep dive) also target, though from a very different scale and platform position.

“The days of the exciting standalone boutique... are over”

Carlo Pirzio-Biroli, who heads CVC’s secondaries strategy and previously ran Glendower before the acquisition, framed the close around platform scale rather than fund performance metrics.

"There's a massive opportunity set as well, with several trillions of capital trapped in unsold private equity holdings."

Carlo Pirzio-Biroli, Head of CVC Secondary Partners, to Bloomberg

"The days of the exciting standalone boutique at the higher end of the market are over. There's a premium to being part of a larger platform, which gives you an edge in sourcing, originating and executing deals."

Carlo Pirzio-Biroli, to Bloomberg

CVC CEO Rob Lucas tied the raise directly to platform breadth in the firm’s own release, noting that secondaries now sit inside €212 billion of group-wide AUM across seven strategies, and flagged credit and infrastructure secondaries as the next adjacencies CVC intends to scale into — a roadmap CVC Secondary Partners had already begun executing when it launched a dedicated credit secondaries platform in November 2025.

The platform-versus-boutique fight this newsletter has been tracking all month

Pirzio-Biroli’s framing lands directly on top of a tension this newsletter has already been documenting from multiple angles in August. PitchBook’s reporting on buyout shops building in-house GP-led secondaries units, TPG, Warburg Pincus, Leonard Green, Accel-KKR, New Mountain, H.I.G., drew a pointed rebuttal from Coller Capital’s Jon McEvoy, who called the speed-to-price pitch “a little bit of a spin.” Partners Group’s own secondaries platform, profiled here on August 23, makes the opposite case for scale: four verticals, a 97% deal-decline rate, and $9 billion-plus raised for its own eighth PE secondaries vintage in April. Now CVC, a buyout major that built its secondaries arm by buying a boutique rather than growing one organically, is making the platform argument from the buyer side of the market, aimed squarely at firms like Capital Dynamics that are betting the opposite: that staying small, specialized and off the mega-deal auction track is itself the edge.

Both arguments can be true for different segments of the same market. But a $10 billion mid-market fund from a €212 billion parent platform, closing in the same month CVC confirms plans to push further into credit and infrastructure secondaries, is a concrete data point in favor of consolidation, one more log on a fire this newsletter has already been watching build via the EQT/Coller and Lazard/Campbell Lutyens deals.

Where this sits against the broader market

SOF VI’s close lands against a backdrop this newsletter has tracked closely: Evercore’s H1 2026 Secondary Market Review put total global secondaries volume at a record $121 billion for the half, with roughly $194 billion of dry powder sitting behind it, a market where LPs, per Rede Partners’ record-high secondaries sentiment reading, are actively rotating more capital toward the strategy specifically because of its ability to return cash faster than a traditional buyout fund’s J-curve. A $10 billion flagship close, with half the capital from LPs new to the platform, is a direct expression of that same demand finding a home with an established, brand-name-backed manager rather than a new entrant.

Some Extra Thoughts

The number that will get quoted is $10 billion. The number worth sitting with is the roughly 72% jump from SOF V to SOF VI, on top of a more than doubling from SOF IV to SOF V three years earlier, two consecutive step-changes in size for a strategy CVC didn’t build in-house at all, but bought. That’s a useful data point against the “buyout shops building secondaries from scratch” story running elsewhere in the market: CVC’s approach was acquisition, not construction, and it’s now the platform’s fastest-scaling secondaries close on record.

Pirzio-Biroli’s “boutique era is over” line is also worth remembering the next time a smaller, specialized secondaries manager closes a smaller, specialized fund and frames it as a deliberate strategic choice rather than a ceiling. Both framings are self-serving in the way that fundraising commentary always is. The market will decide which one is actually right, likely by continuing to do both at once for a while yet.

Sources: CVC Capital Partners, "CVC Secondary Partners raises $10 billion for its sixth global secondary private equity fund," press release, September 3, 2026 (cvc.com) · Swetha Gopinath, "CVC Raises $10 Billion for Its Largest-Ever Secondaries Fund," Bloomberg, September 3, 2026 · Secondaries Investor, "CVC aims for Q3 close for 6th secondaries fund," July 2026 · SecondaryLink, "CVC's sixth secondary fund tops $7 billion target as fundraising continues" · CVC Capital Partners, "CVC and Glendower Capital to establish a strategic partnership in secondaries," September 13, 2021 · Prior Secondary Scoop coverage: "Record Money, Same Month" (media sweep, Aug 23), "Partners Group Has Quietly Built the Most Complete Secondaries Platform in the Market" (Aug 23), "Capital Dynamics: Secondaries Strategy Deep Dive" (Aug 31).

The scoreboard

Start with the headline print, because it sets the stage for everything else. Partners Group raised $16 billion of new capital in H1 2026, up 31% year over year and, per CEO Dave Layton, the best first half the firm has had in 30 years of raising private capital. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed at $26–32 billion. Since 2023, the firm has raised $80 billion while the broader private-markets fundraising market has contracted roughly 15%, meaning Partners Group has been taking real share in a down market, gaining about 50% in relative terms over that stretch.

Total AUM stood at $186 billion at quarter-end, up from $174 billion a year earlier, still tracking toward the firm’s 2033 target of $450 billion-plus. Management income, the recurring, fee-based part of the business that investors reward with a premium multiple, grew 12% at constant currency to CHF 905 million, representing 81% of total revenue in the half. The overall EBITDA margin held at 63%, in line with a bandwidth the firm has kept above 60% for five straight years. Net profit came in at CHF 502 million, flat year over year on a constant-currency basis, translating to a 55% return on equity.

One wrinkle worth flagging for anyone modeling the stock: another curious attendee pointed out that the recurring fee margin actually fell to roughly 109 basis points in H1, versus the 63% headline EBITDA margin that includes them. Management’s explanation was a mix effect, not a business problem: infrastructure and private credit fundraising ran hot relative to private equity in the half, and mix shifts the blended margin around within its historical 1.18%–1.33% management-income-margin band. A large new flagship PE fundraise is coming, which management says will shift the mix back.

The quiet secondaries flex

Here’s the detail that will matter to us, and it came almost in passing. On the call, CFO Joris said plainly: “Thanks to the successful final closes of our direct infrastructure programme and private equity secondaries programme in H1, late management fees, which is part of other operating income, came in very strongly and contributed positively to our management income growth.”

That’s a direct, on-the-record confirmation that the eighth vintage of Partners Group’s private equity secondaries program, which closed on April 17 with more than $9 billion of total commitments, as we covered in our August 23 deep dive on the firm’s four-vertical secondaries platform, is now showing up in the P&L, not just in the press release. Late management fees are a real, cash-generative line item, and Partners Group is telling investors its secondaries franchise is one of the two named drivers behind H1’s management-income beat (the other being the record infrastructure close, itself up roughly 50% on its predecessor).

It’s a small sentence in a 25-page transcript, but it’s the kind of quiet validation that matters more than another glossy program-launch press release: the secondaries business isn’t just raising bigger funds every few years, it’s now a recurring, countable contributor to group financial performance in the same breath as infrastructure, long the firm’s most celebrated growth engine.

The evergreen leverage flag

The sharpest exchange of the call came from Ian White at Autonomous, who pushed on something most of the room seemed to want asked: Partners Group’s own PGPE, its flagship evergreen, semi-liquid private equity vehicle, disclosed in its own 1H update that trailing 12-month EBITDA growth across its portfolio companies has slowed to under 5%, while net debt to EBITDA has climbed from roughly 5x to nearly 7x over the past two years. White asked, bluntly, whether that was representative of the broader private equity industry, why leverage had risen so much, and whether payment-in-kind debt structures were part of the story.

“PGPE has an elevated exposure to vintages 2020, 2021, 2022, driven by the distributions that have to be reinvested in such a vehicle. As such, the broader private equity platform is much more diversified across vintages.”

Dave Layton, CEO, responding to the PGPE leverage question

That’s a real structural point, and worth sitting with. In an evergreen fund, capital returned from realizations doesn’t go back to LPs the way it would in a closed-end vehicle, it gets recycled straight back into the same portfolio. PGPE happened to be receiving heavy distribution flows during the 2020–2022 boom years, so those vintages now make up an outsized share of the fund at exactly the moment aging, boom-era buyouts are the asset class everyone, PitchBook included, in the zombie-fund research we wrote up on August 18, is watching most closely for leverage and growth stress. Notably, the payment-in-kind question was never directly answered.

This is exactly the kind of data point the CV-pricing debate in our zombie-problem piece was missing: not a hypothetical about what an aging, over-levered vintage cohort might look like, but Partners Group’s own flagship retail-facing evergreen fund disclosing it live, in public, on an earnings call.

The redemption tell: 10% above marks

The second half of that exchange is the more secondaries-relevant one. BNP Paribas’s Arnaud asked whether the roughly 5%-per-quarter evergreen redemption rate was putting pressure on marks, the fear being that heavy redemptions create an incentive to keep valuations low. Portfolio Solutions co-head Roberto Cagnati, who is stepping into a co-CEO role in January, pushed back hard, stressing that marking is done under IFRS as an independent process, unconnected to redemption flows.

“Typically, there will be one price for the same asset across the platform. I think it’s true also for the last six months that, on average, we sold our assets at about 10% above our marks.”

Roberto Cagnati, incoming co-CEO

Ten percent above marks, sustained over six months, is a genuinely strong data point, it’s the same directional signal our August 18 piece found in Jefferies’ and Campbell Lutyens’ H1 2026 continuation-vehicle pricing data, where single-asset CVs were pricing at or above NAV while multi-asset baskets lagged. Read generously, it says the secondary market is pricing these evergreen positions fine and it’s the official marks that are conservative. Read more skeptically, and management essentially conceded this point unprompted, some of that premium may reflect selection: managers naturally sell their strongest, most saleable assets first, and “the early investors, they made five times,” as one executive put it later in the call, describing exactly the kind of vintage that’s easiest to move at a premium.

On liquidity gates, management repeated guidance from its July AOM update rather than giving new numbers: gates on its more mature, private-equity-focused evergreen strategies are expected to persist for another 12 to 18 months, even as the broader evergreen platform, including new joint ventures, is still expected to add $20–30 billion of growth. Management declined to say how many funds are currently gated.

A $75 billion exit backlog

Performance income, the variable, exit-driven part of revenue, came in at $233 million in H1, or 19% of revenue, split roughly 48% private equity and 40% infrastructure, and driven mainly by direct-portfolio exits rather than fund-level realizations. Full-year guidance was trimmed to the low end of a 20–25% range, which one analyst noted was effectively a five-point cut versus where guidance stood a quarter earlier. Management’s explanation was timing, not deterioration: several sizable exits, including one large transaction close to being agreed, are more likely to close in early 2027 than in December.

That matters because of what management is holding out beyond this year: a $75 billion realizations pipeline currently being worked, which they expect to push performance income to 25–40% of revenue over the next three years and beyond. For a secondaries audience, that’s a supply signal worth logging, a firm with Partners Group’s demonstrated appetite for GP-led structures across all four of its secondaries verticals is sitting on a large, aging exit backlog at the exact moment exit markets remain, in its own words, “reasonable but not straightforward.” Some of that $75 billion will find its way to strategics and IPOs. Some of it, on recent form, will likely find its way into continuation vehicles instead.

The changing of the guard

The other headline from the call: Dave Layton, CEO for nearly eight years, is stepping into the newly created role of CIO and chair of the Global Investment Committee starting January 2027, a return, in effect, to the private equity investing seat he held before becoming co-CEO in 2019. Filling the CEO chair: a co-CEO structure, with Juri (who built out the firm’s credit business before running infrastructure and, most recently, serving as president) and Roberto Cagnati stepping in together.

The Cagnati appointment is the one worth underlining for this audience. As we noted in our August 23 profile, he’s the executive most directly credited with building Partners Group’s mandate, evergreen and structured-products franchise, the same evergreen business now at the center of the leverage and redemption questions above. Having the architect of that franchise now co-running the firm is either a vote of confidence that evergreens remain core to the 2033 growth plan, or an acknowledgment that the franchise needs its builder’s direct attention at the top table. Both readings are plausible, and the call gave ammunition for either.

What we’re watching next

• Whether the private equity secondaries programme’s late-fee contribution becomes a recurring disclosure line, or was a one-time H1 close effect that fades from the numbers by year-end.

• Any update on PGPE’s leverage trajectory and the unanswered payment-in-kind question, management pointed to “next March” for a fuller AI/data-driven portfolio update, which may be the next natural moment for more disclosure.

• Whether the 5%-per-quarter evergreen redemption rate and the 10%-above-marks pricing hold up as gates persist over the next 12–18 months, or whether that spread compresses as more mature vintages exit.

• How much of the $75 billion realizations pipeline lands via strategics and IPOs versus GP-led secondary structures once it starts closing in 2027.

EQT AB confirmed this morning that it has completed its combination with Coller Capital, seven months after the two firms signed a definitive agreement on January 22, 2026. Coller now operates as "Coller EQT," a standalone Secondaries segment inside EQT's reporting structure. The deal's price and structure were set back in January; today's release is the close itself, plus a handful of figures and a quote worth flagging on their own merits.

The Deal Terms, for Reference

EQT and Coller signed a definitive agreement on January 22, 2026, alongside EQT’s full-year 2025 earnings release, and set the deal’s economics then. Today’s close confirms those terms went through unchanged:

The structure is worth sitting with for a moment. A base deal that’s roughly 96% equity rather than cash tells you EQT wanted Coller’s people bound to EQT’s own share price going forward, not paid out and gone. The earn-out works the same way twice over: it’s itself performance-linked, and nearly two-thirds of it is pre-committed to convert back into EQT stock, a retention mechanism dressed up as a bonus pool. And the carry split: 10% on the fund largely raised under Coller’s independent banner, 35% on everything after, signals exactly how EQT is pacing integration: light-touch economics on what already exists, full house-policy economics on everything Coller EQT raises from here.

A Fourth Segment for EQT

Coller EQT is reported as a new Secondaries business segment, sitting alongside EQT’s existing Private Capital, Infrastructure, and Real Assets segments, a standalone reporting line rather than a division folded into Private Capital. Jeremy Coller’s appointment as Head and CIO, reporting to Per Franzén with an Executive Committee seat, keeps him with both governance standing at the parent company and continued authority over origination, underwriting, and investment decisions at the platform he built. EQT is explicit that the “Coller EQT” brand exists specifically to signal that independence is being preserved, not folded away.

The Scale, in One Line

Combined EQT assets under management stand at €341 billion ($389 billion) as of June 30, 2026, of which €186 billion is fee-generating, a combined figure that only exists now that the deal has closed. The transaction adds nine new strategies to EQT’s client offering across private equity and credit secondaries, spanning closed-end funds, evergreen products, and insurance-dedicated solutions, and the combined evergreen platform now exceeds €10 billion in net asset value. EQT reaffirmed its commitment to double Coller’s fee-generating AUM within four years.

The release also notes Coller EQT “has begun early preparations for continued expansion into new asset classes” — broader in scope than anything said in the Salata interview, which was framed specifically around credit secondaries as EQT’s re-entry point into that market. Today’s language is open-ended: no asset class is named, but the signal is that the platform is being built to expand past its current PE and credit secondaries remit.

The Convergence Thesis, Now Said Twice

On Bloomberg TV two weeks ago, EQT’s global chair Jean Salata said he expects “some sort of convergence between primary and secondary funds,” framing the roughly $4 trillion NAV overhang in private markets as the long-term growth engine for secondaries rather than a backlog to clear. Today, Jeremy Coller, the person actually running the combined secondaries platform, went further:

“Secondaries are one of the most compelling opportunities in private capital today and, as the market matures, my personal expectation is that in the long-term secondaries will become private equity.”

Jeremy Coller, Head and CIO, Coller EQT

Salata described convergence as a coming trend. Coller’s goes much further, not secondaries converging with private equity, but secondaries becoming private equity. Coming from the person whose name is now on EQT’s fourth reporting segment, that reads less like marketing language and more like a stated thesis for how the platform will be built out.

StepStone Group closed its debut infrastructure secondaries fund at $1.7bn on August 26, a solid but unremarkable number by 2026 standards. What makes it worth a closer look isn't the size, it's the sequencing: infrastructure is now the fifth distinct secondaries strategy StepStone runs across private equity, venture capital and growth equity, real estate, private debt and infrastructure, built on top of a $913bn total-capital, $245bn-AUM platform that gives every one of those strategies its own primary-and-co-investment data feed.

The news: infrastructure secondaries closes at $1.7bn

StepStone Group Inc. (Nasdaq: STEP) announced last week that it has completed fundraising for StepStone Secondaries Infrastructure Fund (”SSIF”) and related separate accounts, reaching $1.7bn in total capital commitments. The commingled fund itself closed at $1.5bn, surpassing its original target and hitting the hard cap; the remainder came through separate accounts running alongside it.

SSIF is StepStone’s first closed-ended commingled fund dedicated exclusively to infrastructure secondaries. It buys LP interests in infrastructure funds and invests in GP-led secondary vehicles run by third-party infrastructure sponsors, with a stated tilt toward the middle market: the same less-efficient segment StepStone’s other secondaries strategies target. As of August 2026, the fund is roughly 50% deployed across 26 closed LP-interest and GP-led deals, the majority of them in the middle market.

The fund follows the 2024 close of StepStone’s inaugural infrastructure co-investment vehicle, and the firm frames the two as complementary: StepStone Infrastructure & Real Assets invests across primary funds, secondaries and co-investments simultaneously, deploying an average of $13bn a year over the past three years, and the deal flow from all three feeds a proprietary data platform (SPI by StepStone) that the firm says gives its secondaries underwriters visibility into funds and assets before they hit the broader market. Latham & Watkins advised on the fund’s formation.

Why this is really a five-strategy story, not a one-fund story

Read on its own, SSIF’s $1.7bn is a mid-sized fundraise in a year that has already produced a $3.77bn real estate secondaries close (StepStone’s own, in 2025) and a $9bn+ private equity secondaries program from Partners Group. What makes it worth a full platform piece is what it completes: StepStone now runs dedicated, multi-vintage secondaries strategies across five separate asset classes, each with its own flagship fund series, its own sector specialists, and, with the exception of the brand-new infrastructure line, a decade-plus track record.

1. PRIVATE EQUITY SECONDARIES: THE FOUNDING STRATEGY

StepStone’s PE secondaries program is the oldest and largest of the five. StepStone Secondary Opportunities Fund V (”SSOF V”) closed in September 2024 at $7.4bn including separate accounts, more than double the size of its predecessor, against $4.8bn for the commingled fund itself. Since inception, StepStone has deployed over $14bn across more than 210 PE secondaries transactions, split between LP-led and GP-led deals. The strategy is co-headed by Thomas Bradley and Mark Maruszewski, supported by a 37-person dedicated team.

2. VENTURE CAPITAL AND GROWTH EQUITY SECONDARIES: THE FASTEST-GROWING

StepStone launched its first VC secondaries fund in 2014, when the venture market was, in the firm’s own words, “an order of magnitude smaller.” StepStone VC Secondaries Fund VI (”VSF VI”) closed in June 2024 at $3.3bn, the largest fund StepStone says has ever been raised exclusively for venture capital secondaries. The strategy buys LP interests in venture funds, provides liquidity to founders and early investors in mature venture-backed companies directly, and structures portfolio strip sales, tenders and continuation funds alongside GPs. It’s run out of a 75-person venture and growth equity investment team, with John Avirett and Hunter Somerville as named partners on the fund.

3. REAL ESTATE SECONDARIES: THE LARGEST FUND ON THE PLATFORM

StepStone Real Estate Partners V (”SREP V”) closed in April 2025 at $3.77bn in primary commitments: StepStone’s own materials call it the largest real estate secondaries fund raised to date, ahead of a prior record held by Goldman Sachs. Including co-investments and discretionary vehicles, the total program exceeds $4.5bn. Unlike the PE and VC strategies, StepStone Real Estate’s approach, dating back to the unit’s 2009 founding by Jeff Giller, Josh Cleveland and Brendan MacDonald, has been control-oriented from the start: GP-led secondaries and recapitalizations rather than passive LP-interest purchases, a strategy the team says it pioneered coming out of the Global Financial Crisis. SRE’s advisory arm oversees roughly $170bn in real estate assets under advisement, conducting more than 1,000 manager meetings a year, which the firm frames as its primary secondaries deal-sourcing edge.

4. PRIVATE DEBT / CREDIT SECONDARIES: THE STRATEGY WITHOUT ITS OWN FLAGSHIP YET

This is the one line that doesn’t fit the same pattern. StepStone has been active in private debt secondaries since at least the early 2020s, buying performing direct-lending LP interests, a strategy the firm’s own research has described as a natural response to 2022’s denominator-effect selling, when private debt’s relatively strong performance made it a comparatively painless place for LPs to take a valuation haircut. StepStone has referenced a “Credit Opportunities Fund 1” with strong secondaries-driven performance, and private debt secondaries capability is embedded inside StepStone Private Debt more broadly, including within evergreen retail vehicles such as CRDEX. But StepStone has not yet announced a dedicated, numbered private-credit-secondaries flagship fund series on the scale of SSOF, VSF or SREP, worth watching given how aggressively Coller, Ares, HarbourVest and a wave of new entrants have built out credit secondaries as a distinct product line in 2026.

5. INFRASTRUCTURE SECONDARIES: THE NEW ARRIVAL

SSIF, as above: first dedicated commingled fund, $1.7bn total, closed August 26, 2026.

The pattern across all five

Every StepStone secondaries strategy sits inside a unit that also runs primary fund investments and co-investments in the same asset class. The firm’s stated thesis is consistent across PE, VC, real estate and infrastructure: deal flow and manager relationships built through primaries and co-investments feed proprietary insight (captured in its SPI platform) that informs how the secondaries teams price and source deals, an integrated-platform argument StepStone repeats nearly verbatim in each fund’s announcement.

Why the sequencing matters more than any single close

Multi-asset-class secondaries platforms aren’t new: Partners Group’s four verticals (PE, real estate, infrastructure, and private credit since April 2025) is the most obvious comparison this project has already profiled, and Ardian, Coller and HarbourVest have each pushed into credit or infrastructure secondaries from a PE base in the past few years. What distinguishes StepStone’s build is less the breadth than the depth in each vertical: SSOF V and VSF VI are both fifth-or-sixth-generation flagship funds with over a decade of vintage history, not first-time strategies bolted on to chase a hot market. SREP V’s control-oriented, GP-led-first approach, a genuine strategy differentiation dating to 2009, has already produced what StepStone calls the largest real estate secondaries fund ever raised. Against that backdrop, infrastructure secondaries isn’t StepStone experimenting with a new product; it’s the firm extending a repeatable playbook, primary-and-co-investment relationships feeding proprietary secondaries deal flow, into the one major asset class where it didn’t yet have a dedicated vehicle.

The gap that remains is private debt. Every other StepStone secondaries strategy above has a named, numbered fund series with a public close announcement. Credit secondaries, arguably the single fastest-growing sub-segment of the entire secondaries market this year, per the wave of BDC-redemption and direct-lending CV activity this project has tracked through Evercore, Jefferies, Ares and Coller data, does not yet have that at StepStone. Whether that’s a deliberate choice to keep the strategy embedded inside the broader Private Debt unit, or a flagship fund still being built, is worth asking StepStone directly.

Our Secondary Scoop take

The infrastructure close is a useful reminder of how secondaries has stopped being a single strategy and become a category that gets rebuilt, asset class by asset class, inside nearly every large private markets platform. StepStone’s version of that build is unusually legible because the firm names its funds sequentially and publishes a close announcement every time, which makes it easy to line five strategies up side by side and see that four of them share almost identical language about relationships, proprietary data and less-efficient market segments. That’s either a genuinely consistent institutional thesis applied five times, or a marketing template applied five times. Probably some of both. What’s harder to dispute is the deployment discipline: SSOF V, over 50% committed; SSIF, roughly 50% deployed across 26 deals within months of closing. For a strategy that keeps getting pitched to LPs as the market’s most reliable source of near-term DPI, showing the capital actually going out the door quickly is doing more work than another record-fund headline.

The move

PGIM’s secondaries platform, Montana Capital Partners (mcp), has hired Lucas Radal as its first Head of Middle East Secondary Investments, a newly created role based in Abu Dhabi. Radal joins from Mubadala Capital, where he was a senior investment executive, and spent the decade before that at Ardian’s secondaries and primaries team (2013–2024), including through Ardian’s own $2.1bn secondaries deal with Mubadala Capital, a transaction he had a front-row seat to from both sides over his career. He holds a master’s in international finance from IAE Aix-Marseille, where he also lectures in private equity.

His mandate, per MCP: source and execute secondary investment opportunities globally and support PGIM’s capital-formation efforts in the region. mcp’s own announcement is unusually direct about what this actually is, not a coverage hire tacked onto an existing office, but the firm “expanding the secondaries platform in the Middle East” outright, in partnership with parent company PGIM. CEO Dr. Stephan Wessel called it “a pivotal time in the continued evolution of PGIM’s secondaries platform.”

The firm behind the hire

Montana Capital Partners built its reputation doing the opposite of what grabs headlines: staying deliberately mid-market while Ardian, Blackstone Strategic Partners and Lexington slug it out over billion-dollar single-asset auctions. Founded in Zug, Switzerland in 2011, mcp spent a decade building a book on proactive sourcing and balanced GP-led/LP-led exposure before PGIM (Prudential’s asset management arm) bought the firm in 2021 and slotted it into PGIM Private Alternatives.

The numbers back up the “specialist, not bystander” framing: mcp runs north of $5bn across its platform, with roughly $3.9bn of that sitting in its flagship Opportunity Secondary Program: six vintages in, 140+ transactions completed, OSP VI closing at $1.4bn in February 2026 alone. The team is lean for that AUM, around 45 people split between Zug and New York.

New York is the template worth watching here, but the Abu Dhabi move isn’t a copy of it. mcp opened its own New York office in 2023, hiring a former Newbury director, relocating staff from Zug, because half of its last three funds were already being invested in the US. Abu Dhabi is structured differently: rather than standing up its own outpost, mcp is embedding Radal inside PGIM International’s existing Abu Dhabi office. It’s expansion by attachment, not by lease.

Riding PGIM’s coattails into the Gulf

That distinction matters, because mcp isn’t arriving in the Middle East cold, it’s plugging into ground PGIM has spent two years preparing. PGIM opened its Abu Dhabi office in 2024 and has since inked partnerships with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO) and Kuwait’s Kamco Invest. Earlier this year the platform pushed into private credit secondaries with a stated $1bn deployment target over two years. Radal’s hire is the private equity secondaries leg of that build-out finally getting a name and a desk.

The framing MCP is using: Gulf institutions “increasingly using the secondary market to manage private markets exposures, rebalance portfolios, and access liquidity”, describes LPs on both sides of the table: Gulf sovereign wealth and pension capital as sellers looking for portfolio liquidity, and increasingly as buyers and co-underwriters on GP-led deals. MCP wants coverage on both flows, from someone who’s already sat inside a major Gulf allocator.

Why it matters for the secondaries market

This is not an isolated data point. UBS, PGIM, Asante and others have all made discrete Gulf or Middle East secondaries hires over the past year, a sign that global secondaries managers are treating Gulf coverage the way they treated Asia coverage five years ago: not a nice-to-have, but table stakes for anyone raising a global program. For a mid-market specialist like mcp, staffing this before the mega-cap firms have fully saturated it is a bet on being early, not late, to Gulf relationships that are only going to get more competitive to access.

The question worth watching: does Radal’s desk stay a one-person coverage post inside PGIM’s building, or does it eventually earn mcp its own lease the way New York did? Either way, the pattern holds, mcp doesn’t plant flags speculatively, it shows up where its parent and its LPs have already cleared the ground. Abu Dhabi just became the third stop.

Record secondary volume tends to raise the same question every year: growth, or crowding? Adam Freda, Co-Head of Secondaries at 50 South Capital, argues it’s the former, and his firm has the kind of track record that gives the argument real weight: two decades in the market, a fifth dedicated secondaries fund closed oversubscribed last year, and a buyer base that, by Freda’s own account, still can’t keep up with seller demand.

Northern Trust doesn’t run a secondaries desk under its own name. The exposure sits one layer down, inside 50 South Capital Advisors, the Chicago-based alternatives subsidiary of Northern Trust Asset Management, a firm with a longer secondaries history than most names that come up first in the market’s coverage. It’s a similar shape to the story about Partners Group this week: a large, patient secondaries book operating quietly inside a much bigger, better-known parent, rarely mentioned in the same breath as Coller Capital, Ardian, or Lexington Partners despite genuine scale and staying power.

50 South laid out its house view on the state of the market this year, in a report by Adam Freda, Managing Director and Co-Head of Secondaries, published through Northern Trust Asset Management. The core question it answers: does record transaction volume mean the secondaries market is getting crowded, or does it simply mean the opportunity is expanding alongside it? Freda’s case for the latter draws on the firm’s own multi-decade dataset, and on what two decades of underwriting secondary transactions has taught 50 South about how this market actually behaves.

Why 50 South doesn’t see a bubble

The report opens with the question every institutional allocator is asking: does the market’s rapid growth signal a bubble? Freda’s answer starts with turnover: the share of total private markets NAV that actually changes hands on the secondary market each year. That figure has held in a tight band, he argues, even as headline dollar volume has climbed to successive records. The logic: secondaries are a derivative of the much larger primary market, so as private markets NAV grows, the pool of assets available to trade grows with it. Record dollar volume, in this framing, reflects a bigger denominator — not a speculative rush to trade.

The report backs that up with a demand-side observation: today’s market favors buyers, not sellers. More institutions want liquidity through secondaries than there is well-capitalized capital to meet them, citing Evercore’s 2025 Secondary Market Report and conversations with sell-side advisors suggesting a meaningful share of assets marketed in 2025 didn’t ultimately clear. The buy side itself remains small: roughly 100 dedicated secondary funds operate globally, and the realistic pool of bidders on any single deal is typically far smaller than that, since most GPs approve only a handful of known counterparties for a given process. Industry dry powder, on 50 South’s estimate, covers only about a year of purchasing capacity against available supply, a dynamic the report says keeps disciplined managers selective rather than forcing them to chase weaker deals.

On returns, the report identifies three repeatable sources: pricing (LP-led stakes typically trade at a discount to NAV, an immediate value at entry; GP-led deals price closer to par and lean instead on asset quality and the sponsor’s forward plan), seasoning (secondary buyers acquire assets already several years into their ownership cycle, skipping the early-year drag of a new primary fund), and selectivity, the natural result of buyers outnumbering sellers. Those same dynamics, the report notes, tend to produce the best entry points during downturns, 2022 being the clearest recent example, when public markets sold off sharply while private valuations lagged, forcing over-allocated sellers to transact at discounts that reflected market stress rather than weak fundamentals. Across a multi-decade history, the median secondary fund has delivered approximately 14% net IRR, per Cambridge Associates, a track record the report frames as structural rather than a product of favorable timing.

How 50 South underwrites GP-led risk

GP-led continuation vehicles now make up roughly half of secondary market volume, and the report spends real space on how 50 South evaluates them. The clearest signal of deal quality, in Freda’s telling, is GP alignment: a sponsor rolling its own interest and committing fresh capital into the continuation vehicle, rather than cashing out entirely, is the strongest indicator of genuine conviction in the asset’s forward plan. Because the sponsor sits on both sides of a GP-led transaction by design, the market has built governance mechanisms to manage that conflict directly.

GOVERNANCE MECHANICS THE REPORT POINTS TO

• Competitive process: well-run GP-led deals are intermediated by an investment bank, with pricing established through third-party bidders rather than the sponsor setting its own terms.

• LP choice preserved: existing LPs can exit at the transaction price or roll into the new vehicle on equivalent terms, no investor is forced out at a price they find unacceptable.

• Independent checks: LP advisory committee approval, and in many cases an independent fairness opinion, are standard in well-governed deals.

• Position sizing: 50 South and disciplined peers typically cap any single holding at around 2% of fund NAV, well below the 10 to 15 companies a traditional concentrated buyout fund might hold.

That last point ties directly to the report’s answer on concentration risk. Assets moving into a continuation vehicle have typically been owned by the sponsor for several years already, the operational risks that tend to surface early in a buyout’s life have usually already played out by the time the deal reaches a secondary buyer. The report cites Morgan Stanley Private Capital Advisory data putting transaction-level losses on GP-led continuation funds at roughly 8%, against an approximately 17% loss rate for primary buyout funds, a gap the report attributes to that combination of tighter position sizing and de-risked, more mature assets.

Evergreen versus drawdown

The report closes on a portfolio-construction question this newsletter has tracked since Lazard flagged rising evergreen and ‘40 Act adoption among secondary investors: how should an allocator choose between an evergreen vehicle and a committed drawdown fund for secondaries exposure? 50 South’s answer draws a clean line. Evergreen structures suit investors seeking broad, continuously available exposure, but the need to manage ongoing subscriptions and redemptions tends to tilt those portfolios toward more widely available LP-led deals, with returns that track the broader private equity market. Drawdown funds, without that redemption obligation, can concentrate capital in higher-conviction opportunities, an advantage the report says is most valuable precisely during market dislocations, when evergreen vehicles need to preserve liquidity right as drawdown funds are best positioned to lean in.

Who 50 South is, and how it got here

50 South traces its lineage to October 2011, when Northern Trust combined its private equity and hedge fund platforms into an internal unit called the Northern Trust Alternatives Group. That group was spun out and rebranded in June 2015 as 50 South Capital Advisors, the name borrowed from the firm’s Chicago headquarters address, with roughly $3.0 billion in assets under management and $1.3 billion in assets under advisement at launch, or about $4.3 billion combined.

Growth has come steadily since. By a 2023 interview, Freda described the firm at roughly $14 billion total, split between a $2 billion hedge fund-of-funds book and $12 billion in private equity. As of December 31, 2025, per 50 South’s own site, the firm reports approximately $13.1 billion in assets under management and $5.4 billion in assets under advisement, about $18.5 billion combined, and a meaningfully larger advisory footprint than two years earlier.

The clearest proxy for the secondaries book’s own scale is fund-level: Private Equity Strategic Opportunities Fund V (PESOF V), the firm’s fifth dedicated secondaries vehicle, closed in July 2025 at $1.2 billion — oversubscribed above its original target. It closed alongside Private Equity Core Fund XI (PECF XI), the eleventh vintage of 50 South’s broader flagship program, at $893 million, blending primary commitments, secondaries, and co-investments across U.S. and European small- and mid-market buyouts plus select early-stage venture exposure. The pairing mirrors a structure this newsletter has already flagged at Partners Group: a core program supplies deal flow and manager relationships that feed the dedicated secondaries fund, and vice versa.

“[PESOF V represents] the culmination of over 15 years of experience investing in the secondaries market,” Freda said at the fund’s close, a track record the firm’s own research puts at over 20 years today, including more than a decade specifically in GP-led transactions.

HOW 50 SOUTH COMPARES ON SCALE

The bigger platform behind it

Northern Trust Corporation’s second-quarter 2026 results, reported July 22, give a sense of the scale 50 South sits inside, and a signal that secondaries fundraising is a live priority at the parent-company level, not just a 50 South talking point. On the earnings call, CEO Michael Grady told analysts the wealth-management alternatives platform “added funds to our platform across secondaries, buyout, venture, and growth strategies” during the quarter, with capital raised in the first half of 2026, plus deals currently in process, “approaching 80 percent of last year’s full year total.” That figure spans the whole alternatives shelf rather than secondaries alone, but it lines up with 50 South’s own disclosure that PESOF V and PECF XI investors spanned “wealth, family offices, intermediaries, consultants and institutions”, the wealth channel is an active, growing distribution pathway for the firm’s secondaries products, not an afterthought.

The same materials show alternatives momentum across two other parts of the bank: in Asset Servicing, assets under administration across hedge funds, private capital, and semi-liquid structures combined surpassed $1 trillion in the quarter; in Asset Management, the segment that houses 50 South’s own fundraising, management flagged “fundraising across secondaries and custom alternatives” as a driver “broadening the Alternatives platform.” Taken together, it’s a picture of a bank leaning into alternatives distribution from three directions at once, at the same moment 50 South is fresh off its most successful secondaries close to date.

When people list the firms that define secondaries, the same names come up: Coller Capital, Ardian, Lexington Partners, HarbourVest. Partners Group rarely makes that list, despite having closed what was, in 1998, the largest secondary transaction ever recorded, and despite now running dedicated secondaries programs across private equity, real estate, infrastructure and private credit simultaneously. In the first half of 2026, secondaries accounted for 64% of everything the firm deployed into portfolio assets, against 36% for direct investments. That’s not a side strategy anymore. That’s more than half the business.

The deal that started it: Zug, 1998

Partners Group was founded in 1996 in Zug, Switzerland, by three former bankers: Urs Wietlisbach, Marcel Erni and Alfred Gantner; who each put in an equal share of the firm’s initial capital. The market they were entering barely had a name: as Gantner has recounted, “private equity in the way we understand it today did not exist, it was called Risikokapital, risk capital, which was associated with venture capital.” The firm’s first product, in 1997, was a $150 million small- and mid-cap fund focused on German-speaking Europe, an easier place to find an edge than the more competitive US market of the time.

The following year, Partners Group closed a $265 million transaction: a portfolio of private equity fund interests bought from Royal Dutch Shell’s US pension fund. At the time, it was the largest secondary transaction ever recorded.

There was no “GP-led” vocabulary yet, no continuation-vehicle playbook, no $121 billion first-half market of the kind Evercore now reports. Just a two-year-old Swiss shop buying illiquid fund stakes off a corporate pension plan that wanted liquidity. It’s the deal that put Partners Group on the map as a secondaries buyer, and, as the numbers below show, the firm never really stopped being one.

From one asset class to four

Most of the names that dominate secondaries headlines built their reputations primarily in one place: private equity fund interests, some later stretching into credit. Partners Group took a quieter, broader path: it built a dedicated, standalone secondaries program inside every major asset class it invests in, each with its own decades-long track record.

• Private equity: active since that 1998 Shell deal, with $35 billion cumulatively deployed across 400+ transactions and every mature closed-end secondaries fund since 2008 ranked first quartile. The eighth flagship PE secondaries program closed in April 2026 with over $9 billion in total client commitments, 60% already committed at closing across a seeded portfolio, and roughly a third of new capital coming from outside Europe, led by Asia-Pacific.

• Real estate: deploying secondaries capital since 2008, with $6 billion invested across 120+ transactions. The firm’s fifth real estate secondaries program launched in June 2026 targeting $1.5 billion, with a first close above $650 million; the prior vintage ranked top-quartile among 2021/2022-vintage funds per Preqin.

• Infrastructure: running secondaries since 2006, one of the longest track records in that specific niche, with a fully realized net IRR of 18% since inception across 70+ transactions. The latest program closed in July 2026 at over $5.5 billion (a $1.7 billion closed-end fund plus mandates and co-investment vehicles), roughly $2 billion of which was deployed in the prior 12 months alone — including leading a continuation vehicle for a 69-aircraft commercial aviation leasing portfolio and co-leading one for a UK railway rolling-stock leasing platform.

• Private credit: the newest leg, launched in April 2025 through a joint venture with Generali Investments: a Luxembourg RAIF, classified Article 8 under SFDR, dedicated to global private credit secondaries across both LP-led and GP-led transactions. Partners Group sits in as investment advisor and joint distributor, effectively doubling the combined platform’s origination capacity in a private credit market Preqin estimated at $1.6 trillion in 2025.

Breadth with a filter: what gets turned down

The four-asset-class spread could easily read as a firm chasing every deal that crosses its desk. The 2024 private equity figures argue the opposite. Partners Group deployed $3.2 billion into PE secondaries that year, more than double 2023’s $1.5 billion, across 25 transactions spanning over 80 GPs, 150 underlying funds and roughly 3,000 portfolio companies, more than 80% of it into LP-portfolio deals (the largest: a €800 million NAV portfolio bought from a major UK private pension scheme, covering 12 fund interests and 250+ companies).

Against that $3.2 billion actually deployed, the firm says it reviewed $125 billion of secondaries opportunities over the same year: and declined 97% of it.

That ratio matters right now. It lands in the middle of a live debate in this market: the one about who gets to price a continuation vehicle and how fast. PitchBook’s reporting on buyout shops building in-house GP-led units (Warburg Pincus, TPG, Leonard Green and others) has framed speed-pricing “in two to three weeks as opposed to two to three quarters”, as Warburg Pincus puts it, as the new competitive edge, drawing pushback from specialists like Coller Capital’s Jon McEvoy, who has called the framing “a little bit of a spin.” Partners Group’s own numbers sit on the other side of that argument: a firm with four dedicated secondaries verticals that still says no to 97% of what it sees is making a case for selectivity over speed, worth keeping in mind the next time a two-week pricing turnaround gets pitched as the industry’s next edge.

Secondaries stopped being the side business

The clearest evidence that this is now core strategy rather than a diversification play sits in Partners Group’s own H1 2026 numbers. Of the $9 billion the firm invested in portfolio assets in the first half of the year, 64% went into secondaries and only 36% into direct investments, a split that would have been unthinkable for a firm that built its brand, and its first fund, on direct private equity in German-speaking Europe.

Total assets under management reached $186 billion as of June 30, 2026, up from $174 billion a year earlier, with H1 new client commitments of $16 billion (versus $12 billion in H1 2025) against full-year guidance of $26–32 billion. By asset class: private equity at $79.2 billion, private credit at $40.5 billion, infrastructure at $41.4 billion, real estate at $23.3 billion, and a smaller royalties strategy at $1.5 billion, the same four-plus-one structure that now runs its own secondaries program in every major bucket except royalties.

Partners Group has told investors it expects total AUM to exceed $450 billion by 2033 (more than $200 billion of that in private equity, more than $70 billion in private credit) as it bets the broader private markets industry more than doubles over the next decade. Nothing in that target singles out secondaries specifically. But if the 64% H1 2026 split holds anywhere close to its current shape, the growth path to $450 billion runs disproportionately through the four secondaries programs, not around them.

Why we don’t talk about them enough

Partly, it’s a branding choice. Coller Capital, Ardian and Lexington built firm-level identities around the word “secondaries”; it’s the headline of what they do. Partners Group never has: secondaries at Partners Group is a capability embedded inside private equity, inside real estate, inside infrastructure, inside private credit, rather than a standalone identity with its own front door. There is no single “Partners Group Secondaries Fund” for the market to watch, because there are four of them, running concurrently, each with a multi-decade record most standalone secondaries shops would envy: first-quartile PE vintages since 2008, an 18% net IRR in infrastructure since 2006, top-quartile real estate performance, and a fast-scaling credit vehicle built with one of Europe’s largest insurers.

The 1998 Shell deal is worth remembering not just as trivia, but as a reminder that Partners Group was underwriting illiquid fund stakes before most of today’s GP-led vocabulary existed.

The anniversary the FT is marking

The hook is timing: it's been almost a year since First Brands and Tricolor filed for bankruptcy, and Jamie Dimon's “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more” became the epigraph for a year of hand-wringing over the roughly $2tn private credit market. The FT's verdict now: last summer's scare “was not a blip.” Direct lending is under real strain, non-accrual loans at the 20 largest public BDCs hit their highest level since 2017 this quarter, even as investment-grade asset-backed lending holds up fine..

The rest of the warning, briefly

The editorial’s other worry lines are worth flagging even though they sit outside secondaries: circular ownership between private capital firms and the life insurers they’ve increasingly bought or founded to fund private credit with policyholder premiums, overseen by state rather than federal regulators, with a federal investigation now open into one such structure built by Mark Walter; Blue Owl’s flagship private credit arm posting its slowest fundraising pace in three years this summer after a stretch of heavy withdrawal requests; and a global “bond glut” pushing market rates up and contributing to a recent sell-off. All real. None of it is where the story gets a number attached to it, that’s the Ares sentence.

The sentence that matters

Strip away the FT’s framing and what actually happened is this: Ares went to raise a continuation vehicle to move a slice of its own aging private credit book (older loans, harder to exit) into a new fund, at a fair market value somewhere in the region of €700m to €1bn depending on which account you read (9fin and the FT’s own reporting differ slightly on the exact figures, though both describe the same deal and the same rough magnitude). Prospective buyers looked at Ares’s marks and wouldn’t pay them. Rather than accept the deeper discount the market was demanding, Ares simply shrank the deal: to somewhere between €350m and €400m, roughly half of where it started, with fewer loans transferring across.

“One of the rare moments when private credit marks face real-market testing.”

9fin, reporting on the Ares scale-down, 7 August 2026

That framing is exactly right, and it’s the reason this belongs at the center of the FT’s story rather than in a supporting clause. A markdown is one firm’s opinion about what its own loan is worth, checked by nobody with money on the other side of the trade. A continuation vehicle is different: it’s the one moment in private credit where an outside buyer, with every incentive to lowball and no obligation to be polite about it, has to put an actual bid on the table. Secondaries is, structurally, the private credit industry’s only real price-discovery mechanism; and this month it returned a number nobody at Ares wanted to hear.

Same firm, opposite outcome

Here’s the detail that turns this from an anecdote into a market signal: Ares Credit Secondaries, the buy-side arm of the same firm, led the €2.5bn Arcmont private credit continuation vehicle earlier this year, and that deal closed oversubscribed, priced at a nominal premium to par, with Ares syndicating pieces out to other investors. Same house. Same asset class. One side of the building got a clean, strong close; the other got told to cut the deal in half.

That’s market bifurcation stated as plainly as it gets. It isn’t that credit secondaries pricing is soft across the board, headline numbers on the best deals (Audax at $1bn led by Pantheon, Arcmont at €2.5bn led by Ares, TPG Twin Brook at $3bn led by Coller) have all closed at nominal premiums to par over the past year. It’s that whose book it is, and how strong the relationship and the underlying assets are, now decides which side of the line a deal lands on.

“Attractive pricing and the most complex, differentiated deals still go to platforms with the deepest GP relationships.”

— Rakesh Jain, Pantheon’s global head of private credit

It also lines up with what EQT’s new global chair, Jean Salata, said on Bloomberg TV the same week, explaining why EQT is re-entering credit for the first time since selling its own credit business in 2020 — via Coller Capital’s credit secondaries book, not a new lending platform. “There’s more sellers than buyers,” he said of the current dislocation, calling it “excess return potential... some alpha opportunities there,” and a “first window, first look at what’s happening in the credit markets.” Ares having to cut its own deal in half is what that dislocation looks like up close.

This is happening inside the fastest-growing corner of secondaries

None of this is occurring in a quiet market. In the same three-week stretch as the Ares scale-down, Willow Tree Credit Partners closed a $730m credit continuation vehicle led by HarbourVest; Bridgepoint began exploring a roughly $1.15bn private credit secondaries sale; and Jefferies Credit Partners started marketing a €1bn vehicle to move its own loan book off balance sheet. Evercore’s H1 2026 review already has private credit secondaries volume at $20bn for the half (more than all of FY2025) with $31bn of dry powder sitting behind it. Jefferies’ own research puts the segment’s volume compounding at 70%+ a year since 2023; Coller Capital’s Michael Schad is calling 2026 a likely record year, with the house view putting the market at $40bn by 2027. Across the broader manager-led secondaries market, credit’s share of volume jumped from 5% to 11% in a single year.

Two of the biggest platform acquisitions of 2026 are direct bets on this exact mechanism scaling further: EQT’s deal for Coller Capital and Lazard’s pending acquisition of Campbell Lutyens both explicitly cite credit secondaries as strategic rationale, not an afterthought. The smart money isn’t just watching the dislocation the FT is worried about, it’s buying the toll booth.

What hasn’t shown up yet

The one number that should temper any tidy narrative: BDC redemption requests are up roughly sixfold since the third quarter of 2025, per Evercore, but hardly any of that pressure has actually converted into secondary-market volume so far; Cox Capital’s tender offer amounted to just 0.1% of combined BDC NAV. The release valve everyone expects to open hasn’t fully opened yet. Whether it does, and whether more of it clears through vehicles that behave like Ares’s cut-in-half deal rather than Arcmont’s oversubscribed one, is the next thing worth watching.

The FT told its readers to watch for cracks in private credit. The crack it chose as its best evidence showed up in a continuation vehicle it never named as one, priced by buyers who don’t care whose fund it is or what story goes with it. That’s the argument for covering secondaries as the center of this story rather than a footnote to it: it’s the one place in private credit where the stress everyone’s talking about stops being a mark on a page and starts being a number somebody actually had to accept.

Buried in the report is a line that tends to get quoted out of context: “The rise of GP-led secondaries is not coincidental; it maps almost directly onto the period when exit markets seized up and aging assets began to accumulate.” Read on its own, that sentence is an easy indictment: continuation vehicle growth as proof of a zombie problem, full stop. But that’s not actually what PitchBook argues. The report draws a specific, testable line (and two market reports published within days of it, Jefferies’ H1 2026 Global Secondary Market Review and Campbell Lutyens’ H1 2026 Secondary Market Flash Report), hand us the pricing data to check it.

The Test PitchBook Actually Proposes

Here’s the distinction, in the report’s own words: “When a GP rolls an asset into a CV at or above its prior carrying value, and sophisticated secondary buyers that conduct real diligence and are under no obligation to participate agree to that pricing, it is a credible signal that the asset has genuine merit and the sponsor has conviction. Single-asset CVs built around high-quality businesses with growing earnings, reduced leverage, and active acquisition histories are a legitimate tool for capturing additional value.”

The concern PitchBook actually raises is narrower than “CVs are bad.” It has two specific triggers: multi-asset vehicles where stronger assets can obscure weaker ones inside a blended basket, and pricing that clears below the GP’s prior carrying value, what the report calls “a quiet but telling acknowledgment that the mark was optimistic.”

Concern arises when CVs are used to avoid the discipline of the open market -especially in multi-asset vehicles where stronger assets can obscure weaker ones- or when pricing falls below the GP’s prior carrying value.

PitchBook, “Private Equity’s Zombie Problem,” Aug. 17, 2026

The Market Is Already Running This Test

Campbell Lutyens’ H1 2026 flash report is, in effect, a live scorecard for exactly the distinction PitchBook draws. Single-asset CVs (SACVs) and multi-asset CVs (MACVs) are diverging sharply on price, and the direction of travel is telling.

SACV discounts actually tightened slightly, from 3.1% at year-end 2025 to 2.9% in H1 2026, with 69% of all single-asset deals clearing at par or better. MACV discounts, meanwhile, moved from 4.2% to 10.5%, more than double, in two quarters, and only a third of them priced at par or higher. Campbell Lutyens’ own read is nearly identical to PitchBook’s: “While pricing remains strong for SACVs, discounts widen materially for MACVs as investors differentiate between high-quality and mixed-quality portfolios.”

SACV discounts tightened to 2.9% amid strong demand for high-conviction assets. While pricing remains strong for SACVs, discounts widen materially for MACVs as investors differentiate between high-quality and mixed-quality portfolios.

Campbell Lutyens, 1H 2026 Secondary Market Flash Report

That’s not a market being fooled by camouflage. It’s the opposite: buyers pricing the basket risk PitchBook warned about, in real time, and charging for it.

Sponsors Are Self-Selecting, Too

Jefferies’ H1 2026 review adds a second layer to the picture. Continuation vehicles now account for 89% of all GP-led secondary volume, up from 73% in 2020, and 14% of total sponsor-backed exit volume globally, up from just 5% in 2020, CVs have gone from a niche liquidity tool to a mainstream exit channel, with 82 of the top 100 sponsors by AUM having now executed one. Single-asset structures make up 68% of that CV volume.

The detail that matters most for the zombie debate: the average vintage of companies moved into a single-asset CV is 2019, seven years old, squarely inside PitchBook’s own “acute concern” zone for holding periods. Sponsors aren’t avoiding their oldest assets when structuring single-asset deals; they’re leading with them, because those are the assets they’re confident will clear real diligence from a buyer with no obligation to say yes.

Where the Opportunity Sits for Secondary Buyers

PitchBook is unusually direct about who benefits from this dynamic, and it isn’t only distressed or special-situations buyers. “Secondary buyers can deploy capital into CVs or LP portfolio sales at improved pricing,” the report notes and “these same secondary buyers (the sophisticated investors who set CV pricing through arm’s-length negotiation and independent diligence) are among the most direct beneficiaries of the zombie dynamic, as their pricing leverage increases precisely when sponsors are most motivated to transact and least able to demand full value.”

The H1 2026 data shows two distinct ways that leverage is being monetized. On the single-asset side, capacity is the constraint, not opportunity: Jefferies reports that nearly 15% of secondary investors can now write checks above $250 million into SACVs, up from 11% in 2025, and a growing subset can commit more than $500 million; buyers with that scale are positioned to win high-conviction, well-underwritten stakes in genuinely strong assets at fair, defensible prices. On the multi-asset side, the opportunity runs the other way: buyers with the diligence bandwidth to price each underlying asset individually, rather than trade the headline discount, are the ones capturing the spread between a MACV’s blended ask and what the weak assets inside it are actually worth.

Sidorov, an early Spotify backer, and Revolut chairman Martin Gilbert are both anchor investors in the vehicle. LTC’s broader portfolio already includes stakes in Klarna and Plaid, and the firm’s marquee position, Revolut, backed six years ago, has appreciated more than 900% since entry, aided by at least two secondary share sales along the way. Company filings list Sidorov, Gilbert and LTC Chief Investment Officer Denis Blank as the three directors of LTC Invest Ltd.

The fund itself is structured on fairly conventional terms for the space: a 2% management fee paired with a 20% performance fee, registered in Delaware. Blank, who joined LTC full-time in September 2024 specifically to build out its investment arm after a career that included nearly a decade at Hermitage Capital Management, has been explicit about where the strategy sits: this is a venture secondaries fund, not a diversified private equity one. LTC does not lead investment rounds, instead co-investing alongside existing VC backers, and it’s targeting companies already valued above $500 million with a three-to-five-year exit horizon.

“The VC sector needs a vibrant secondaries market.”— DENIS BLANK, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, LTC INVEST

That line, given to WealthBriefing, is the clearest statement of LTC’s thesis: unlike buyout and growth-equity secondaries, which have institutional buyers at every size point, fund- and company-level venture secondaries in Europe remain thin. It’s also, almost verbatim, the argument being made right now by a whole cluster of managers building competing vehicles — a bigger cluster than Bloomberg’s story lets on.

At least six funds the last year.

Bilbao-based Acurio Ventures (formerly All Iron Ventures) closed the most direct comparable to LTC in July: Acurio Secondaries I FCR, a €115 million vehicle that came in above its €100 million target and pushed the firm’s total AUM past €450 million across five vehicles. Acurio buys fund-level LP stakes in other European VC funds, not direct company positions — a structural distinction from LTC’s approach, even though both funds are being raised in the same window and citing the same liquidity gap.

Molten Ventures, the London-listed VC, took a different route: rather than raising a standalone fund immediately, it hired a three-partner team — Malcolm Ferguson and Nick Sando from Octopus Ventures, plus ManyPets co-founder Steven Mendel — in March 2026 to build a third-party secondaries fund alongside its existing balance-sheet strategy, which has already returned a 2.5x MOIC on prior secondary purchases including Seedcamp and Earlybird fund stakes.

Further east, Estonia’s Siena Secondary Fund closed its second vehicle at €50 million in September 2025, backed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Estonia’s SmartCap as co-leads, plus more than 100 private backers. Siena II is a direct-secondaries fund focused on Central and Eastern Europe and the Nordics — a geography almost entirely absent from the London-centric coverage of this trend.

Vienna-based Speedinvest, meanwhile, closed the first of two planned continuation vehicles at €30 million in 2025, with a second €30 million vehicle following shortly after, moving stakes from its 2015 vintage (a cohort that includes GoStudent, Wefox, Refurbed, Inkitt and Upvest) into new structures. CEO Oliver Holle has said the firm plans to “roll out several continuation funds over the next few years.” Worth noting: the LPs backing Speedinvest’s vehicles include Acurio Ventures and Molten Ventures — two of the managers named in Bloomberg’s “four funds” story are already transacting with each other, not just running parallel strategies.

And in London, Ian Osborne’s notoriously secretive Hedosophia disclosed in April 2025 that it had raised $200–300 million at first close for a fund focused on direct secondary deals and strip sales in growth-stage companies across the US and Europe, with a larger final close still being raised.

Acurio has described its fund as “the first vehicle of its kind dedicated exclusively to European VC fund secondaries.” That claim doesn’t hold up well against the record. London’s Isomer Capital launched a £100 million fund in April 2024 that is majority allocated to exactly that strategy, LP interest stakes in VC funds, run by Joe Schorge and Omolade Adebisi, the latter previously on Coller Capital’s private equity secondaries team. TempoCap, which Sifted has called “one of Europe’s best-known secondaries players,” has been buying direct startup stakes for years. London’s Launchbay Capital reached first close on a $100 million VC secondary growth fund back in January 2024. Geneva-based Giano Capital launched a single-asset late-stage secondary fund in 2023 and had raised €20 million toward it as of that year. And Denmark’s Nordic Secondary Fund, running since 2018, finished deploying its second fund into Nordic and Baltic companies as recently as June 2025.

Where it hurt: mid-cap M&A stuck in a “rain delay”

CEO Scott Adelson pinned the Corporate Finance shortfall on two overlapping shocks that began surfacing on the firm’s Q4 call and persisted through the quarter: instability tied to the war in the Middle East, and a technology-sector repricing concentrated in software. Firmwide technology revenue, “the bulk of which is software,” per CFO Lindsay Alley, was down about 54%, or $53 million, for the quarter. Deal volume held roughly flat year over year (127 closed transactions versus 125), but the average fee per closed deal fell sharply as larger, more complex mandates got pushed out rather than cancelled. Management was explicit that backlog and new-mandate activity in Corporate Finance are at record levels, and that the rate of deals going dead or on hold hasn’t moved, this is a timing problem, not a demand problem, in their telling.

Sponsor-driven deal flow was named as a specific drag: “sponsors are putting their toes back in the water one at a time, very, very slowly,” management said on the call, and every fresh headline risk sends them back to the sidelines. That’s the same caution that’s kept trade-sale and IPO exit windows narrow across the market this year, and the same dynamic pushing GPs toward continuation vehicles and other secondaries-driven liquidity tools instead of waiting for a strategic buyer or an IPO.

Where it worked: FVA hits a record, and restructuring is the forward story

Financial and Valuation Advisory, the segment that marks private portfolios, supports fund audits, and increasingly underpins GP-led secondaries pricing, posted a record 1,042 Fee Events in the quarter, up 9% year over year, and revenue grew 13% to $89 million even as the rest of the firm contracted. Management called out growth across all three FVA service lines and pointed to the firm’s Morningstar-branded CLO benchmark partnership as an early step toward monetizing its proprietary marks and pricing data more broadly.

Financial Restructuring revenue dipped 8% to $119 million on fewer closed transactions (23, down from 35), though the average fee per deal rose. Management framed this as timing, not softness, and reiterated that restructuring activity is expected to stay “at elevated levels” for the full fiscal year. The more interesting comment came in response to a question about how long the software slowdown could keep feeding the restructuring pipeline.

“What’s affecting us today in M&A is going to have a positive impact on our restructuring business over the next two to three years because of the investments we’ve made in technology and specifically in software.”

Houlihan Lokey management, Q1 FY2027 earnings call

Management tied that directly to continued dislocation in private credit, the same asset class increasingly showing up in secondaries deal flow through NAV loans, preferred equity, and private-credit-fund secondaries. Their read: highly leveraged software companies financed through private credit are the setup for a multi-year wave of restructuring mandates, not a one-quarter blip.

Why it matters for secondaries

None of this makes Houlihan Lokey a secondaries shop in the way Moelis, Jefferies, or Evercore’s dedicated GP-led teams are, HLI’s growth ambitions here center on FVA’s valuation and data business rather than a standalone continuation-vehicle advisory practice. But the quarter is a useful data point for two threads Secondary Scoop has been tracking. First, the exit drought: a mid-market M&A cycle management itself describes as a “rain delay” is exactly the environment pushing LPs and GPs toward secondaries-driven liquidity instead of waiting out a strategic sale. Second, the private credit and software stress management expects to convert into restructuring mandates “over the next two to three years” sits upstream of the NAV lending and distressed-fund secondaries activity this newsletter covers regularly, a forecast worth revisiting each quarter as it plays out.

There’s also a talent-market footnote: Houlihan Lokey is where Rich Saltzman (the banker Moelis just hired away from Jefferies to run its new GP-led Advisory practice) started his career, before Guggenheim and Jefferies. HLI added three new managing directors this quarter and now counts 260 in Corporate Finance alone.

The smaller print

Houlihan Lokey declared a regular quarterly dividend of $0.70 per share, payable September 15 to holders of record as of September 1, and repurchased 348,000 shares during the quarter. Cash and investment securities stood at $797 million as of June 30, 2026, down from roughly $1.36 billion at the end of March, largely reflecting annual bonus payouts. The firm’s adjusted compensation ratio held at its long-standing 61.5% target, which management said it expects to maintain for all of fiscal 2027, while the adjusted effective tax rate is guided to 26–28% for the year. Separately, HLI’s acquisition of Intrepid Financial Partners, an independent energy-sector investment bank, is expected to close by the end of the second fiscal quarter and will add 32 bankers to the firm’s energy practice.

But going strategy-by-strategy, one number stands out from everything else in the report: LPs planning to increase allocations to secondaries jumped from 14% to 23%, a nine-percentage-point swing. Nothing else in the survey moved that much. Infrastructure, the next-best performer, rose five points. Industrials rose seven. Aerospace and defence, the sector everyone’s been talking about, rose four. Secondaries beat all of them.

The RLI sub-index confirms it isn’t noise

Rede doesn’t just ask LPs a single yes/no question, it also tracks a dedicated RLI sub-index for secondaries funds and purchases, built the same way as the headline number (diffusion index, 50 = flat, above 50 = expansion). That sub-index rose two points to 63, and 46% of LPs now say they expect to deploy more capital to secondaries over the next year, against just 20% planning to deploy less.

What makes this notable isn’t the two-point rise, it’s where 63 sits in the series. Going back through Rede’s data since the sub-index launched in 2H 2022, the reading has bounced between the high-40s and low-60s: 48, 58, 54, 56, 49, 53, 61, and now 63. This is the highest secondaries reading Rede has ever recorded. LPs have never told this survey they were more enthusiastic about secondaries than they are right now.

Secondaries RLI hits 63, an all-time series high, and the biggest LP allocation swing of any strategy in the survey.

GP-led deals told a similar, if quieter, story. The dedicated RLI for GP-led transactions ticked up from 54 to 56, with the share of LPs planning to deploy more capital rising from 32% to 38%. During 2025, transaction values for GP- and LP-led continuation vehicles rose 41%, and Rede’s LP conversations suggest further increases are expected over the next 12 months.Why now: the DPI math finally makes secondaries the obvious trade

The timing isn’t a coincidence. Rede’s survey also asked LPs to name their top concern heading into 2026 allocations, and the answer wasn’t close: 71% cited the slow pace of exits and distributions (DPI), almost double the next most common concern, managing macroeconomic challenges, at 39%. The backlog behind that number is real: the pool of unrealized PE-backed companies has grown from roughly 13,000 to around 16,000 in the past year, and median holding periods have stretched to about seven years, up from roughly five before the pandemic. A growing population of dormant “zombie” funds, up 16% annually over five years, per TREO Asset Management, is trapping LP capital in vehicles that keep charging fees while delivering nothing back.

Secondaries funds sell themselves directly against that pain point: they’re structurally built to return capital faster than a traditional buyout fund’s J-curve allows, which is precisely what a liquidity-starved LP base is rewarding right now. Rede’s report puts it plainly, the rise in secondaries appetite “comes off the back of strong performance among secondaries funds alongside their ability to deliver DPI faster than traditional buyouts, an appealing prospect in a liquidity-scarce environment.”

It also lands on the back of a record fundraising year for the strategy in 2025, giving LPs fresh vintages to actually deploy into.

Why this lands hardest in Europe

The regional data makes the secondaries story sharper still. Europe is where LP sentiment is moving fastest of anywhere in the world: the inbound RLI for Europe climbed seven points to 67, now the highest of any region, ahead of North America’s 59 and well clear of Asia-Pacific’s 40. Rede is seeing LPs “building European manager coverage for the first time,” deliberately prioritizing meetings with regional GPs to develop a clearer view of the opportunity set after years of portfolios skewing heavily to the US.

On the surface, the fundamentals back that up. European deal value rose 8% in 2025, buyout transactions above €500m rose 19%, and exit values jumped 64% year-on-year. The 2026 IPEM Pan-European Private Equity Barometer found 73% of GPs planning to launch a new fund this year, and 55% of respondents feeling strongly positive about Europe’s prospects, up sharply from just 38% in 2025.

Europe’s inbound RLI hits 67, the highest of any region, even as closed-end fundraising there falls 41%.

But sit that next to one other number in Rede’s report and the picture gets more complicated: fundraising for Europe-based closed-end structures fell 41% over the same period, even as North America’s rose 8%. Deal-making and exits are accelerating in Europe; primary fundraising for new blind-pool commitments is doing the opposite. That’s not a contradiction so much as it’s the European version of the exact dynamic driving the secondaries boom globally, LPs are more willing to underwrite liquidity and known assets than they are to write a fresh cheque into a ten-year primary vehicle, and Europe’s compliance costs and deal-timeline friction (which Rede notes persist despite the European Commission opening a March 2026 consultation specifically aimed at improving institutional investors’ access to EU private capital) only sharpen that preference. For LPs chasing European diversification without taking on a new blind-pool commitment, and for European GPs facing real resistance on primary raises despite a genuinely strong deal environment, secondaries and continuation vehicles are turning into the path of least resistance on both sides of the trade.

The market underneath is getting more sophisticated, not just bigger

Rede flags something worth watching for anyone tracking deal structuring rather than just headline volumes: the investor base for GP-led secondaries is broadening and getting more comfortable underwriting a wider range of risk profiles and transaction structures. The report specifically calls out that “the universe of variations on the CV theme is expanding, with CV2s, RIVs, and ‘legends’ funds gaining prominence”, and suggests this expanding menu of structures may itself be feeding the more positive sentiment showing up in the survey.

That’s consistent with what LPs are separately signalling about GP-led deals more broadly: for most fund managers, the primary use case for continuation vehicles remains returning liquidity to investors, but LPs themselves, per a StepStone/Bain survey Rede cites, remain “lukewarm” about that framing, and market commentators have grown more openly critical of CVs used purely as a liquidity mechanism. Sentiment is rising even as scrutiny of how these deals get done is rising with it, a tension worth watching rather than a contradiction that’s been resolved.

The contrast that makes the story

Set the secondaries number against what happened to tech-focused funds in the same survey and the picture sharpens. LP appetite for technology-focused PE funds collapsed 17 points to just 8%, the lowest reading since Rede started asking the question in 2021, driven by fears of a structural repricing of software valuations and a possible AI-specific bubble. In the same six-month window, in the same survey, of the same LP base: conviction in one of private equity’s most-hyped growth stories cratered, while conviction in the market’s plumbing, the mechanism that gets LPs their cash back, hit an all-time high.

That’s the story underneath Rede’s headline number. LPs aren’t necessarily more bullish on private equity broadly; they’re more bullish on the parts of it that can prove they’ll actually return capital. Right now, nothing in the survey proves that better than secondaries.

The hire

Saltzman brings more than 20 years advising financial sponsors on strategic alternatives and liquidity in the secondary market, single- and multi-asset continuation vehicles, strip sales, tender offers and other structured solutions. His path to Moelis runs through three of the desks that have spent the past few years building out GP-led secondaries franchises of their own: Houlihan Lokey, then Guggenheim, then Jefferies, where he helped stand up the GP-led advisory practice from the ground up. Matt Wesley, Moelis’s Global Head of Private Capital Advisory, described the hire as a chance to “work alongside Rich again” and said it would “further strengthen our secondaries capabilities.” CEO and co-founder Navid Mahmoodzadegan framed it as reflecting “both the strength of our platform and our ongoing commitment to investing in exceptional talent to better serve clients globally.” Full announcement below.

What the Q2 print actually shows

Moelis’s July investor presentation, covering the quarter ended June 30, 2026, puts GAAP revenue at $409.4 million, with an 18% adjusted operating margin and a 65.8% compensation ratio. Trailing-twelve-month revenue through Q2 2026 is $1,574 million, up 203% since FY2014. None of that growth is specific to secondaries, but the hiring behind it is.

Moelis grew its managing director ranks from 94 in 2014 to 182 as of June 2026, adding 31 product-line MDs since 2023. Private Capital Advisory got 8 of those — more than M&A (6), Capital Markets (5), Sponsors coverage (5), or Capital Structure Advisory (5). That’s the real story inside for us, from our Secondary Scoop angle: PCA is the one product line where Moelis has been adding senior secondaries and capital-solutions bankers fastest, and Saltzman is simply the highest-profile name to land inside that pattern.

The firm can afford to keep making that bet. Moelis is debt-free, sitting on $481.1 million in cash, and has returned roughly $3.3 billion to shareholders since its 2014 IPO, 110% of GAAP net income in 2025 alone. That capital-light model is what lets Moelis keep funding its PCA build-out even though secondaries revenue never shows up as its own line item in the disclosures. Put simply: the firm has the balance sheet to keep buying senior GP-led talent, and the Q2 numbers show it’s choosing to spend that flexibility on secondaries.

The franchise Saltzman is joining

PCA at Moelis is built around three capabilities: Secondary Market Advisory (continuation funds, LP liquidity, equity recaps, NAV loans and preferred equity), Tailored Capital Raise (co-investments, managed accounts, seeded fundraises, stapled primaries), and Primary Fundraise (global fund placements, first-time funds, top-up raises, vertical extensions). The team carries an average of 20+ years of experience per managing director and cites more than 1,500 global LP relationships spanning secondary firms, consultants, pension plans, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, endowments and family offices.

The deal list in the presentation is a fair cross-section of where GP-led activity is concentrated right now: a $570 million continuation vehicle for Carlyle’s Content Partners, a $1.7 billion vehicle for Antares Capital extending ownership of loans, a $1.2 billion continuation vehicle tied to TowerBrook’s stake in EisnerAmper, a continuation vehicle for Charlesbank’s Bridgepointe, a continuation vehicle transaction for Ethos Capital’s Identity Digital, and a $1 billion continuation fund transaction for One Equity Partners covering underlying assets at USCO S.p.A. and DWK Life Sciences. Zoom out further and roughly half of all Moelis transactions now involve a financial sponsor on one side of the table, with cumulative sponsor deal volume climbing from roughly $100 billion in 2014 to $1.5 trillion by the end of 2025.

The package bundles five assets: OpenAI, Verkada, Rippling, Reflection AI, and Glean, plus one detail that stands out: fresh capital to (re-)enter Anthropic, right after the round that valued the company at $965 billion, Bloomberg reported.

We don’t normally cover individual continuation vehicles here at Secondary Scoop. This one is different, and not just because of the headline. Lightspeed has run this exact strategy before, and the differences between the two deals tell you something real about where VC secondaries are headed.

This isn’t Lightspeed’s first continuation vehicle

Back in January 2024, the Financial Times first reported that Lightspeed was exploring a continuation fund of roughly $1 billion, covering stakes in about 10 portfolio companies, around 70% of them enterprise tech. The firm had a term sheet from a lead investor and was targeting a close by July 2024. Notably, that structure came with no additional fees or carry, a term clearly designed to make it easier for existing LPs to swallow, since fee-stacking is one of the standard LP objections to continuation vehicles.

Lexington Partners ended up leading that 2024 deal, part of what Buyouts Insider called Lexington’s “GP-led deal tear” at the time. Per Lazard’s H1 secondary-market report cited in that coverage, growth/venture deals made up only around 14% of GP-led market volume that half, up markedly year over year, but still a minority of the broader GP-led market.

The vehicle eventually closed, PitchBook lists it as the “Lightspeed Multi-Asset Continuation Vehicle,” a 2024-vintage fund that closed at $1.5 billion.

What’s different about Project Mercury

1. It’s a “hold” dressed up as a “sell.” A continuation fund isn’t a real exit, it’s a way of saying “I don’t want to give up this position, but I do want to give my current LPs liquidity.” Lightspeed is using the vehicle to return cash to Select V and Opportunity II investors without having to let go of OpenAI too early. It’s the classic move when a GP believes the best of the markup is still ahead, and it’s the same logic that drove the 2024 deal.

2. The buyer changed: Lexington to Coller. Lexington led in 2024; Coller (freshly owned by EQT) leads in 2026. Worth watching whether this becomes a rotating cast of the same handful of large secondaries funds (Coller, Lexington, Ardian, Pantheon) each taking a turn anchoring VC-led multi-asset CVs, or whether Lightspeed is deliberately spreading its buyer relationships deal to deal.

3. This time there’s a new-money component. The 2024 vehicle was framed purely as a continuation/liquidity mechanism for existing stakes. Project Mercury explicitly bundles in fresh primary capital for Anthropic alongside the continuation piece, a hybrid structure that’s more aggressive than what Lightspeed did the first time around.

4. Concentration went way up. 2024’s ~10 assets were diversified, mostly enterprise tech. 2026’s vehicle is anchored by the two largest foundation-model companies on earth. For the buyer, that’s a much higher single-name concentration bet than a diversified basket, and a bet on two directly competing labs at once.

5. It fits, and amplifies, the macro trend. The underlying driver hasn’t changed since 2024: the IPO window for large private tech companies has stayed mostly shut, marquee names (OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe) keep staying private well past a decade, and traditional 10-12 year VC fund lifecycles don’t match that timeline. Lightspeed’s own chief business officer put it plainly in 2024: VCs “need to take a page out of the private equity playbook” on liquidity. echoing how continuation vehicles went from roughly 41% of PE sponsor-led secondary volume in 2019 to about 80% by mid-2023. The numbers back it up: venture-led GP-led secondaries volume hit $35 billion in 2025, roughly double the 2023 figure, according to a PJT Partners report cited by Bloomberg, against a global secondaries market of $121 billion in H1 2026 transactions alone.

Lightspeed isn’t the only one doing this

• Insight Partners closed its second continuation fund at $1.3 billion, spanning six funds, one of the largest venture-specific CVs to date.

• NEA has been quietly developing its own continuation vehicle.

• RockPort Capital moved two portfolio companies into a CV.

• Shasta Ventures tried to move nearly all the holdings from its last fund into a CV, LPs rejected the pricing, which had been offered at roughly 65% of the Q3 2023 valuation. A useful reminder that these deals don’t automatically clear.

• Reported median performance for continuation funds sits around 1.4x MOIC, roughly in line with dedicated secondaries funds and ahead of typical buyout returns, one reason LP appetite for CV exposure keeps growing even when individual deals, like Shasta’s, don’t.

The open question

How do you price an OpenAI or Anthropic position inside a continuation fund when neither company is transparent about its cap table or deal terms? That’s the real risk (and the real opportunity) for Coller and any buyer stepping into a structure like this. It’s also worth watching whether other large multi-stage VCs with heavy OpenAI/Anthropic exposure follow Lightspeed’s lead: doing this twice in under three years, each time bigger and more concentrated, looks less like a one-off and more like a template.

Jefferies tracks GP-led transaction volume across five sector buckets: Tech & TES, Business Services, Healthcare, Industrials, and Other. Comparing the full-year 2025 mix to the H1 2026 mix shows one sector moving far more than any other.

The math is nearly exact: tech’s 13-point loss is matched almost point-for-point by gains of 3, 3, 4, and 3 points spread across the other four buckets. It reads less like organic growth in healthcare or industrials dealmaking and more like tech’s share simply being reallocated elsewhere in the mix.

“Questions around the durability of software valuations amid accelerating AI disruption reduced buyer appetite for software-focused transactions.”

Jefferies, Global Secondary Market Review, July 2026

Jefferies’ own explanation, from the same section: “as technology activity slowed, other sectors including healthcare, financial services, industrials, and business services absorbed much of the volume displaced from software transactions.” That’s a direct, if brief, confirmation of the mechanism, buyers didn’t necessarily walk away from GP-led dealmaking broadly, they walked away from software specifically, and the same pool of capital that would have gone into a software CV went into a healthcare or industrials one instead.

From a Secondary Scoop perspective, the signal isn’t “private equity is stuck.” It’s that private equity’s original business model: buy, hold five to seven years, sell at a premium, was never built to survive the amount of capital that’s now locked inside it. What’s breaking isn’t the industry. It’s the assumption that illiquidity could stay temporary forever.

The Number Everyone Is Reading as Bad News

The surface-level facts are, in isolation, genuinely troubling for LPs who signed up for a specific promise. The Times cites MSCI data showing U.S. private equity generated annualized returns of just 6.4% from mid-2022 through Q1 2026, trailing the S&P 500’s 15.2% and the Nasdaq’s 19.3% by a wide margin over the same window. Andrew Milgram of Marblegate Asset Management put the diagnosis bluntly: “private equity is stuck because those companies have failed to fulfill their value promise.”

Apollo’s own Q2 2026 results carried the same message from the inside. The firm attributed weak private equity division performance to exits being “prudently delayed.” Higher-for-longer rates killed cheap leverage. Sponsor-to-sponsor demand, historically a major exit channel, thinned out. None of that is in dispute.

What is worth disputing is the implicit conclusion most coverage draws from these facts: that a growing backlog is evidence of an industry in trouble, full stop. That reading only holds if you assume private equity’s job was always supposed to be turning illiquid assets into liquid ones on a fixed five-to-seven-year clock. It wasn’t, that clock was a convention, not a law of physics. And conventions get rebuilt when the volume of capital behind them outgrows what they were designed for.

Every asset class that has ever locked up enough capital for long enough has eventually built a secondary market around it. Bonds did. Private real estate did. Private equity is simply doing it later, and at a scale that makes the transition impossible to ignore.

What the Backlog Actually Signals

Read as a standalone data point, 33,575 unsold companies is a warning. Read as the fourth consecutive year of the same trendline, rising steadily since a decade-ago base of under 16,000, it’s something closer to a market structure problem with a known category of solution. The industry raised an enormous amount of capital during a period of historically cheap debt and elevated entry multiples, deployed nearly all of it into assets with hold periods calibrated to that environment, and is now discovering that the exit environment it was designed around no longer exists in the same form. That’s not collapse. That’s a mismatch between the duration of the assets and the liquidity expectations wrapped around them — and mismatches like that are exactly what secondary markets exist to solve.

This is where the standard secondaries narrative undersells itself. The dominant framing — secondaries as the place where distressed LPs sell at a discount and opportunistic buyers scoop up cheap NAV — describes a market from five years ago. It doesn’t describe a market where GPs themselves are initiating continuation vehicles specifically to keep high-conviction assets rather than sell them into a weak market, where recent-vintage pricing on quality assets increasingly clears close to par, and where LPs are using secondaries proactively for portfolio construction rather than reactively for liquidity emergencies. The discount was never the product. Liquidity, optionality, and control over timing were — the discount was just how the market priced those things when supply was scarce and undiscovered.

Maturing, Not Failing

The private equity model being “challenged,” to use the Times’ framing, is a real and accurate description, but it’s also what every large asset class looks like partway through building the infrastructure that makes its own scale sustainable. The public bond market didn’t have meaningful secondary trading until institutional holdings outgrew buy-and-hold convention. Private real estate built out secondary and continuation structures once fund lives started colliding with asset lives that didn’t match. Private equity is arriving at the same juncture later than either of those markets, and arriving at a size, trillions in unrealized NAV, a backlog measured in tens of thousands of companies, that makes the transition unusually visible.

Framed that way, the backlog isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom that forces the cure into existence faster. Every one of those 33,575 companies is, in principle, a future GP-led or LP-led transaction candidate. Not all of them will move through secondaries specifically, and not all of them should, some genuinely need more time, some need operational fixes before any transaction makes sense. But the scale of the number is exactly why secondary market volume has grown in a straight line through an environment where almost every other part of private markets has been under pressure. The backlog isn’t competing with the secondaries market’s growth story. It’s the fuel for it.