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.

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.

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.

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.

AlpInvest’s total AUM reached $112 billion as of June 30, up 16% year-over-year, more than triple the growth rate of Carlyle’s Global Credit segment (4%) and running against a 1% year-over-year decline in Global Private Equity AUM. Fee related earnings hit a record $86.5 million, up 27% from $68.3 million a year earlier, and distributable earnings rose to $95.8 million from $78.2 million. Inflows into the segment totaled $4.5 billion for the quarter, driven by continued fundraising in secondaries and portfolio finance strategies alongside further growth in evergreen wealth vehicles.

The margin story

The more interesting number, for anyone tracking how the secondaries business model is maturing, is FRE margin (fee related earnings as a share of total segment fee revenue). On that measure, AlpInvest now runs meaningfully ahead of Carlyle’s other two segments.

A big part of that margin advantage traces to fee related performance revenues, which more than tripled year-over-year for AlpInvest: from $10.1 million in Q2 2025 to $32.1 million in Q2 2026. On the earnings call, Carlyle’s CFO attributed the jump primarily to demand across the firm’s wealth channel, where year-to-date inflows are running more than 60% ahead of last year, with AlpInvest wealth products singled out as a specific driver alongside the firm’s private equity solution getting picked up on additional distribution platforms.

How CEO Harvey Schwartz frames the business now

Asked directly on the call whether AlpInvest’s growth was cyclical or secular, CEO Harvey Schwartz argued for both, but leaned into a reframing of the business that’s worth flagging for anyone still describing secondaries platforms primarily as GP-led or LP-led transaction shops.

“We’re on a long cycle, extended cycle where secondaries will continue to grow, continue to perform well. And obviously, we’re one of the few hyperscalers in the world that have the capability, global footprint, to capture all that at the right time.”

— Harvey Schwartz, Carlyle CEO, Q2 2026 earnings call

Schwartz went further, describing a structural shift in how AlpInvest’s conversations with GPs and LPs have changed:

“There’s a secular shift here... which is really about how these businesses are truly now corporate finance solutions providers. If you went back several years, it was really about the secondary business, which was really more point-to-point business in some respects. But now our dialogue around the world with GPs and LPs is really about portfolio repositioning, how to think about the optimized portfolio, how do GPs create value for themselves and grow their businesses.”

— Harvey Schwartz, Carlyle CEO, Q2 2026 earnings call

That “corporate finance solutions” framing is doing real work for Carlyle’s fundraising narrative. It’s the same logic underpinning the buildout of the portfolio finance strategy, which the CFO flagged as a specific highlight: Carlyle’s second vintage single-asset secondaries strategy closed this quarter at four times the size of its predecessor fund, a scaling data point that fits the broader pattern of secondaries LPs concentrating capital in repeat, brand-name managers rather than spreading commitments across a wider field of new entrants.

What the fund-level numbers show

Carlyle’s supplemental disclosures give a rare look at vintage-by-vintage secondaries fund performance. The flagship AlpInvest Secondaries Fund (ASF) series shows the scaling trend directly: ASF VIII, AlpInvest’s current-generation diversified secondaries vehicle, closed at $13.4 billion in committed capital, roughly double the $6.8 billion raised for its 2020-vintage predecessor, ASF VII.

SELECTED ALPINVEST FUND PERFORMANCE, AS OF JUNE 30, 2026

Worth noting: ASPF II, AlpInvest’s Strategic Portfolio Finance vehicle, is posting the highest gross and net IRRs of the group at 24% and 17% respectively, despite being only 70% invested. That’s the fund family most directly tied to the “portfolio finance” strategy Schwartz referenced, NAV-based and preferred-equity-style financing for GP portfolios rather than traditional secondaries purchases, and its early return profile helps explain why Carlyle keeps returning to it in investor commentary.

On realizations, AlpInvest generated $1.6 billion of proceeds in the quarter and $10.7 billion over the trailing twelve months, while deploying $3.2 billion in the quarter against $15.1 billion LTM. Net accrued performance revenues for the segment reached $655 million, up 4% from $627 million a year ago — a comparatively modest increase relative to the FRE growth, consistent with a business increasingly monetized through recurring fee income rather than carry realization timing.

Hamilton Lane is currently raising five closed-end strategies simultaneously: core secondaries, venture, credit, infrastructure; and, new this quarter, “our inaugural GP-led secondary strategy.” That’s not a rebrand of an existing sleeve. It’s a standalone vehicle, launched alongside the firm’s seventh flagship secondaries fund, which just held its first close.

The split: Fund VII and a GP-led sibling

Hamilton Lane’s seventh secondaries fund held its first close “just last week” relative to the August 4 earnings call, on nearly $1.3 billion of investor commitments. Management said a second close is already coming later this calendar year, with “good visibility” on the number, and confirmed the firm is running its usual 18-month window from initial close to final close, consistent with how prior secondaries funds in the series have been raised.

What’s new is what’s raising alongside it. Hamilton Lane did not fold GP-led secondaries into Fund VII as a sub-strategy or a side pocket; it named a separate, first-of-its-kind GP-led vehicle as one of the five strategies currently in market. No commitment total was disclosed for the GP-led fund on the call, it’s early, and the firm didn’t break out a first-close figure for it the way it did for the core fund. That itself is a data point: this is a fund being built from scratch, not a bucket getting relabeled.

WHY THE SPLIT MATTERS

Bundling GP-led deals into a classic LP-secondaries vehicle is still common across the industry, it lets a manager point to one fund and one track record while quietly diversifying deal sourcing underneath. Standing up a dedicated GP-led vehicle is a different signal: it says the deal flow, the underwriting discipline, and the investor base for continuation vehicles are now distinct enough from classic LP portfolio purchases to warrant their own capital pool and, presumably, their own fee terms. Worth watching whether other large secondaries platforms follow the same unbundling logic as GP-led supply keeps outpacing LP-led supply industry-wide.

The rest of the closed-end franchise is moving too

Fund VII isn’t raising in isolation. Hamilton Lane’s direct equity platform (its co-investment fund) just finished its raise entirely: $3.8 billion collected in total, split between $3.3 billion in the fund itself and $500 million in separate accounts investing alongside it. The fund portion alone represents growth of more than 57% over its predecessor. Roughly 30% of that capital is already committed across small and mid-market deals, and management characterized early performance as strong, while flagging it’s still early.

Venture is also gaining speed. Hamilton Lane’s second venture fund held its first close during the quarter at more than $370 million, already north of 60% of the total size of Fund I, which raised $615 million in its entirety. Infrastructure is “a few more quarters away” from market, per management, rounding out the five-strategy pipeline through the balance of fiscal 2027 and into early fiscal 2028.

The quarter in numbers

The blended fee rate on fee-earning AUM now stands at 69 basis points, continuing to climb as the mix shifts toward specialized funds, which grew fee-earning AUM by $8.5 billion (+25%) over the trailing 12 months versus a 2% increase in customized separate account fee-earning AUM over the same period. Total incentive fees for the quarter were $114 million, driven primarily by the quarterly crystallization of performance fees on the U.S. private assets evergreen fund. The three largest, most seasoned products in the platform, the U.S. and non-U.S. multi-strategy equity funds and the non-U.S. credit fund, have together generated more than $3.6 billion of total cash realizations from their underlying portfolios to date.

Evergreen liquidity: one fund out of twelve

The evergreen platform generated nearly $640 million of net inflows in the quarter across all strategies, with positive net flows in 10 of 12 funds. The non-U.S. credit fund was roughly flat. The one fund in net outflow was Hamilton Lane’s non-U.S. multi-strategy equity vehicle — its oldest, most mature evergreen product, and also its best performer: a dollar invested in the institutional USD share class at inception was worth $2.32 as of June 30.

Management’s explanation, on the call, split the redemptions into two buckets. The first is straightforward gains-harvesting and rebalancing by longstanding investors whose exposure has grown well past target after years of strong performance. The second is more structural: institutional clients increasingly use the evergreen vehicle as a temporary holding pen for capital earmarked for a separately managed account, then redeem from the evergreen once the SMA is ready to draw. Hamilton Lane framed this as capital retention, not attrition, the dollars move between products, not out the door.

“So headlines, largely not driven by good data, caused investor behavior. And to me, that is an example of a lack of maturity and confidence in an industry and in a sub-asset class that I think is not surprising, given how young it is and how little experience investors have with the space.”

ERIC HIRSCH, CO-CEO, HAMILTON LANE

Hirsch added that Hamilton Lane is “not seeing material differences on the ground between non-U.S. and U.S.” flows, and that the non-U.S. platform’s outflows reflect its longer track record more than any structural weakness, the international evergreen business simply launched more than a year ahead of the U.S. suite. On July trends specifically, he said the firm is “seeing some of the noise subsiding” and “more positive sentiment across the product offerings and across the geographies.”

Balance sheet: three exits in one quarter

Hamilton Lane’s strategic investment portfolio saw three separate liquidity events converge in the same quarter, each tied to a piece of private-markets infrastructure the firm has backed over the past several years.

RUSSELL INVESTMENTS

On July 9, Russell Investments announced that a consortium led by B Capital and including CalPERS had agreed to acquire the firm, in a deal reported at roughly $2.8 billion and expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Hamilton Lane entered a strategic partnership with Russell in March 2021; management said it expects to realize just under $50 million based on its share of the transaction value, with an anticipated gain of approximately $18 million recorded when the deal closes. The firm was clear that ending its economic ownership stake does not end the commercial partnership.

SECURITIZE

Securitize completed its previously announced business combination with Cantor Equity Partners II and began trading on the NYSE under the ticker SECZ. Hamilton Lane originally invested $5 million in Securitize starting in 2022 (tokenizing several Hamilton Lane offerings), then participated in a 2024 strategic funding round led by BlackRock. Post-merger, Hamilton Lane holds approximately 1.5 million shares, subject to a 180-day lockup, and will begin marking the position to the public share price starting next quarter.

CANOE

Bloomberg has agreed to acquire Canoe, the AI-driven alternative-investment data platform Hamilton Lane first piloted internally in 2019 before investing in its Series A in 2020. Hamilton Lane expects proceeds of approximately $30 million from the deal, an estimated gain of more than $15 million versus the position’s current carrying value.

The firm, which manages more than $73 billion in assets globally, said the program drew “strong support from new and existing institutional investors globally.” Adams Street has not disclosed a full breakdown of the $5 billion between the flagship commingled fund and the separate accounts and other vehicles that run alongside it, a structure the firm has used in prior program-level announcements as well.

A Program That Keeps Doubling on Itself

Adams Street has now posted back-to-back step-ups of roughly the same magnitude. Global Secondary Fund 6 closed in 2019 at approximately $1.05 billion and went on to rank in the top quartile of its vintage. Global Secondary Fund 7 closed in May 2023 at $3.2 billion — a program the firm described at the time as “50% larger” than the GSF6-anchored raise. Global Secondary Fund 8 now closes at $2.7 billion within a $5 billion-plus program that Adams Street again describes as roughly 50% larger than its predecessor.

The firm’s overall AUM has grown alongside the secondaries platform, from $54 billion at the time of the 2023 close to more than $73 billion today, a roughly 35% increase in three years. Adams Street’s dedicated secondary strategy dates to 1986, and the firm has completed more than 310 secondary transactions and holds advisory board seats at more than 500 underlying funds, according to the firm’s strategy disclosures. It was also named Secondary Investor of the Year in the 2025 Real Deals Private Equity Awards.

“We are grateful for the strong support of our investors and the confidence they have placed in Adams Street and our secondaries platform. Rising transaction volumes highlight the growing role of secondaries as a liquidity and portfolio management tool for private markets participants.” Jeff Akers, Partner & Head of Secondary Investments, Adams Street Partners

Jeff Diehl, Managing Partner and Head of Investments, tied the raise to the breadth of the market Adams Street is now underwriting across: “As the secondary market expands across both LP-led and GP-led transactions, investors need managers with deep relationships, underwriting rigor, and global reach to navigate a broader opportunity set. We believe Adams Street is well positioned to source differentiated opportunities and invest with conviction on behalf of our clients,” he said.

The Backdrop: A $226 Billion Market

Adams Street’s raise lands against a secondary market that, by Evercore’s estimate, hit approximately $226 billion in total deal volume in 2025, a 41% jump over the prior record and the first year the market has cleared $200 billion. LP-led volume reached roughly $120 billion (up 34% year-over-year) and GP-led volume roughly $106 billion (up 51%), with Evercore also citing about $215 billion in dry powder and next-twelve-month fundraising targets up 89% year-over-year.

Two Distribution Motions, One Platform

The raise also lands a little over a month after Secondary Scoop reported that INVL Family Office, the largest multi-family office in the Baltic states, had launched a closed-end feeder, the Global PE Secondaries Access Fund, giving its clients exposure to the private equity secondary market through Adams Street as the underlying manager. That vehicle, approved by the Bank of Lithuania in June 2026, carries a $145,000 minimum ticket aimed at informed investors rather than institutions.

Taken together, the two stories describe the same platform pulling in two directions at once: a $5 billion-plus institutional flagship program scaling in the traditional LP channel, and a parallel licensing of the same underlying strategy to regional distributors serving family offices and high-net-worth investors who would never write a check directly into Global Secondary Fund 8. Neither motion is new in isolation — large secondaries platforms have courted institutional scale for years, and feeder structures for wealth channels have proliferated across private markets generally. What’s notable is seeing both play out from the same manager within a matter of weeks.

From surplus to just-in-time capital

For most of the secondary market’s history, the defining feature of buyer capital was its abundance relative to opportunity. Dry powder sat as a static pool, built up over successive fundraising cycles, waiting to be deployed. Evercore’s data shows that dynamic breaking down. At 1.0x overhang, available capital roughly matches one year of volume, enough to sustain today’s pace, but with almost no slack if fundraising falters or deal flow accelerates further. The report is explicit that the $154 billion H2 fundraising target isn’t an ambitious stretch goal; it’s the amount required just to keep the market moving at its current speed.

A “record” quarter of GP-led supply is not simply evidence of a booming, capital-rich market, it is evidence of a market converting capital into deals faster than it is being replenished. The implication cuts both ways. For LPs and family offices allocating to secondary funds, it argues for urgency: capacity is genuinely scarcer than headline dry powder figures suggest, and access to top-tier managers matters more when the buyer base isn’t sitting on excess reserves. For GPs and sellers, it argues the opposite: a tightening capital base gives well-positioned buyers, particularly the roughly ten firms holding the bulk of dedicated capacity, real pricing leverage on anything short of best-in-class.

Where the slack is actually coming from

The market isn’t relying on dedicated secondary funds alone to fill that gap, and this is where the report’s other threads connect back to the capital story. Evergreen vehicles have gone from a niche product to mainstream infrastructure: 53% of buyers now operate one, and secondary-focused evergreen AUM has reached roughly $130 billion, with $11 billion of expected inflows over the next twelve months earmarked specifically for secondaries. These vehicles don’t replace flagship fundraising, they typically finance only a minority of any purchase price, but they smooth the cycle, giving buyers capital in hand between traditional raises exactly when a 1.0x overhang leaves no room for a pause.

Credit and infrastructure secondaries are doing something similar from a different angle: they’re expanding the total addressable pool of dedicated capital rather than recycling the existing one. Credit secondary deal value hit $20 billion in H1 alone, already surpassing all of 2025, with $31 billion of dry powder and 90%+ of buyers planning to raise more within a year. Infrastructure volume rose 33% to $12 billion, backed by $22 billion in dry powder that’s up 10% year-to-date even as overall market dry powder fell. Both are effectively new capital formation, not redeployment of the same $194 billion — which is precisely what a market running at 1.0x overhang needs to keep expanding.

The GP-led side is pricing conviction, not diversification

The other angle worth pulling out is what’s happening to return logic inside GP-led deals. Single-asset continuation vehicles now account for 53% of GP-led volume, up sharply from last year (SACV transaction volume rose 88% YoY), and the majority price at or above NAV. Normally, paying full price or a premium would compress forward returns. Instead, buyers are underwriting SACVs to average gross multiples of ~2.3x over four years, meaningfully higher than the ~1.9x targeted for multi-asset continuation vehicles, ~1.8x for single LP interests, and ~1.7x for diversified LP portfolios.

That is a real inversion of how secondaries traditionally priced risk. Diversified portfolios used to command the premium multiple for the diversification itself; now the highest return targets sit with the most concentrated, single-company bets, because buyers get the deepest diligence access and the clearest view of the exit path. Layer in that more than a third of GP-led deals now include super-carry terms, giving sponsors greater upside participation to win competitive processes, and the picture is a market where capital is being priced less like a portfolio-rebalancing tool and more like direct, high-conviction equity investing with a continuation-vehicle wrapper.

The one segment still waiting

If there’s a counterweight to the “capital is tight” thesis, it’s venture secondaries, where volume has stayed flat at $5 billion for a full year despite $10 billion of dedicated dry powder sitting largely idle: capital that exists but isn’t finding a home. The “SaaSpocalypse” repricing in public software bled into private marks in early 2026, widening bid-ask spreads and pushing buyers out of processes. Buyers there are demanding 20%+ net IRRs and creating what the report calls a K-shaped pricing environment: top-quartile AI-adjacent franchises clearing near par, everything else trading at steep discounts with a hollow middle. Venture is the one part of this market where dry powder abundance, not scarcity, is the live issue, a useful reminder that the capital-tightening story is a private equity, credit and infrastructure phenomenon first, not a universal one.

The takeaway

The headline framing a record first half, on track for a record year is true and worth reporting. But the more durable insight for anyone advising GPs, LPs or startups on secondary-market positioning is that the market has quietly shifted from a capital-surplus business to a capital-velocity business. Growth now depends on continuous, parallel fundraising, recycling and new-entrant capital formation rather than a deep static reserve. That single shift explains why evergreen structures are proliferating, why credit and infrastructure secondaries are scaling so fast, why SACV pricing looks more like direct dealmaking than portfolio liquidity management, and why venture, still sitting on unused dry powder, remains the market’s clearest outlier.

On its own, that’s a fundraising story: a sequel fund more than tripling its predecessor’s size, backed by institutional capital from 26 countries spanning pensions, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, banks, endowments, and family offices.¹ But the more interesting story is what AAF II confirms about how AlpInvest has chosen to organize its entire secondaries business, and what that organization says about where the broader market is heading.

From $500 Million to $1.7 Billion in Four Years

AlpInvest’s first single-asset vehicle, Atom Fund I, launched in late 2022 targeting $500 million, a modest, almost experimental allocation at the time, arriving as the firm was navigating a co-head transition and beginning to rebrand parts of its secondaries platform. AAF II’s $1.7 billion close represents more than a threefold increase in roughly four years, a trajectory that echoes, and arguably outpaces, the doubling the firm’s flagship commingled secondaries fund achieved over the same period.

That parallel is the editorial hook here. AlpInvest isn’t simply raising more capital across its existing secondaries sleeve; it has built a second, structurally distinct vehicle purely for single-company exposure, and that vehicle is now scaling at a faster clip than the diversified flagship. Single-asset CVs were, for years, executed opportunistically out of multi-strategy secondaries pools. A dedicated, repeat, hard-capped fund line is a different signal: it tells GPs that AlpInvest can underwrite and lead the largest, most concentrated continuation deals with capital that was raised specifically for that purpose, not capital being stretched across a diversified secondaries mandate.

“What sets Carlyle AlpInvest apart in this market is not just the dedicated capital, but the platform behind it.”— Julian Rampelmann, Partner, Head of Single-Asset Secondaries and Deputy Head of Secondaries and Portfolio Finance, Carlyle AlpInvest

The Architecture Behind the Announcement

To understand where AAF II sits, it helps to see the full stack. AlpInvest’s Secondaries & Portfolio Finance strategy is now the largest single business line within the platform’s total $106.9 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2026, ahead of both co-investments and primary fund investments.² That is itself a notable shift for a firm whose roots and brand were built on primary fund commitments.

Reading the Deal, Not Just the Release

The single-asset category deserves scrutiny on its own terms, separate from AlpInvest’s specific fund. Single-asset continuation vehicles concentrate risk on one sponsor’s conviction about one company, which is precisely why dedicated capital pools, rather than allocations carved out of diversified funds, have become the industry’s preferred underwriting structure. A diversified secondaries fund sizing single-asset exposure as one line item among dozens faces a different portfolio construction problem than a fund built to concentrate capital in a handful of the highest-conviction, largest-check transactions in the market.

AlpInvest frames the SACV strategy as a natural extension of sponsor relationships built over 25 years and roughly $7 billion committed across 31 transactions in the strategy since 2018.¹That track record matters for a market where SACV pricing and structuring still varies significantly by lead investor sophistication, and where the largest transactions increasingly require a lead that can write the full check rather than syndicate it down.

_{Editorial note on sourcing: Figures on AAF II and the firm’s $7 billion SACV capacity are drawn from Carlyle AlpInvest’s July 15, 2026 press release. AUM segmentation and individual fund sizes for ASF V through ASF VIII and ASPF II are cross-referenced against Carlyle Group Inc.’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, filed with the SEC — not restated from secondary press coverage. As this announcement originates directly from Carlyle AlpInvest, readers should weigh the framing of its own track record and market positioning accordingly.}

_{Sources: [1] Carlyle AlpInvest press release, July 15, 2026. [2] Carlyle Group Inc. Form 10-Q, quarter ended March 31, 2026, and Q1 2026 earnings supplement, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.}

The number: 5% of mid/large buyout deal flow, gone within a decade

Secondary buyouts, one fund manager selling a portfolio company to another, have averaged 36% of exit value over the past 20 years and sat close to 40% in 2025. Schroders’ base case has continuation investments rising from 9% of total private equity exit value in 2025 to 12.5% by 2035. Critically, the firm models that entire increase as coming directly out of the secondary buyout share, which it forecasts falling from 31% to 27.8% over the same period. Since secondary buyouts have represented roughly half of new deal sourcing for mid and large buyout managers over the past decade, Schroders translates that shift into a headline estimate: about 5% of total mid/large buyout deal flow will be displaced over the next 10 years, relative to where it would otherwise sit.

“The most significant disruption is not in the concept of holding companies for longer under private equity ownership, but rather in who retains ownership.”

SCHRODERS CAPITAL, KEY TAKEAWAYS, JUNE 2026

That reframes the competitive stakes considerably. Companies staying in private equity hands for longer isn’t new, sponsor-to-sponsor deals have done that for two decades. What’s being modeled now is a reallocation of control: away from the buyer-side manager who would previously have won the next auction, and toward the incumbent GP working alongside a lead underwriter instead. It is the first time this has been expressed as a number rather than a general trend.

HOW THE ESTIMATE IS BUILT

The 5% figure rests on three assumptions holding simultaneously: that trade sale and IPO share of exits stays roughly flat, that continuation investment share keeps climbing from 9.0% toward 12.5% by 2035, and that secondary buyouts continue to represent about half of mid/large buyout deal sourcing. None of those assumptions are unreasonable on their own, but none are independently stress-tested, worth treating as a modeled estimate rather than an observed trend.

Why the growth looks structural rather than cyclical

Schroders’ own data shows 2025 volumes coming in ahead of what the firm projected a year earlier, $109bn against a revised 2024 base of $76bn, while the cyclical share of that growth actually fell, to 9% in 2025 from 14% in 2024. In other words, even as exit markets show early signs of recovery, continuation investment growth is becoming less dependent on distressed conditions, not more.

That lines up with what limited partners themselves are now saying. Coller Capital’s Summer 2026 Global Private Capital Barometer, surveying 108 LPs overseeing roughly $2 trillion in assets, found that 69% expect CV activity to hold or increase even if traditional exit channels fully recover; only 31% expect a decline. Coller’s data points to a structural mismatch behind that expectation: LPs disagree among themselves about the right holding period for any given asset, with 39% saying GPs aren’t providing liquidity early enough and 22% saying trophy assets are being sold too soon. Continuation vehicles resolve that tension by letting a single GP decision, hold the asset, accommodate LPs who want to exit and LPs who want to keep their exposure, simultaneously.

The “GP-led secondaries” label is a misnomer, Schroders argues

The paper also makes a pointed case against a piece of market shorthand: the term “GP-led secondaries,” often used interchangeably with continuation investments. Schroders argues this creates real confusion, for three reasons: fund managers typically retain (and often increase) their interest in the underlying company rather than crystallizing carry the way a genuine exit would require; these deals usually include a primary component of fresh capital rather than being a pure ownership transfer; and it is the incoming lead underwriter, not the GP, who structures the deal and runs full due diligence.

“When continuation investments are described as ‘private equity selling to itself,’ this is exactly not what these transactions are about,” the paper states. Ares Management has made a related argument in its own recent research, framing GP-led deals as private markets alpha against LP-led “beta,” and pointing to a specific mechanical source of that alpha: continuation vehicle pricing is typically locked at the signing date rather than at closing, so any value the company creates in the months between signing and close, revenue growth, multiple expansion, debt paydown, accrues to the incoming buyer rather than the seller. It’s a structural return enhancement that doesn’t show up in the initial underwriting model.

New data points worth tracking

• 31% of realized buyout portfolio companies are statistical candidates for continuation investments, according to Schroders’ analysis of roughly 2,600 realized deals in its own database, using a return-multiple threshold (2x TVPI) typical of sponsor-to-sponsor and CV target returns.

• $5.7bn in estimated annual fee savings for investors, based on 2025 volumes: continuation vehicle management fees run at roughly half the level of traditional buyouts, with more tiered carried interest.

• A 1.5-year shorter holding period for continuation investments versus traditional buyouts, based on Schroders’ own sample of 91 completed CV exits against 72 buyout co-investment exits. Worth flagging: the paper’s executive summary describes this as “about 25% shorter holding periods,” while the body text calculates a 35% faster time-to-liquidity from the same underlying gap, the two figures aren’t quite consistent with each other.

• A third-party return study from Evercore, covering 387 continuation funds formed between 2018 and 2024, found returns broadly comparable to traditional buyout funds but with lower dispersion, external support for the “more predictable returns” case that doesn’t rely solely on Schroders’ own deal data.

The case for the lower mid-market, updated for a more volatile world

Schroders continues to argue that small and mid-sized buyout companies, those with enterprise values below roughly $1bn, offer the most attractive continuation opportunities, citing lower entry multiples (up to 40% below large-cap buyouts, up to 55% below Russell 2000 peers), a wider set of exit routes, and greater potential for operational transformation. This year’s paper adds a timelier justification: geopolitical insulation. Citing “the latest conflict in the Middle East and related energy price shock,” the firm argues that smaller, more domestically-focused, services-weighted portfolios are less exposed to the trade and geopolitical tensions currently driving market volatility. Private equity-backed companies generate about 90% of revenue domestically compared with 60% for public companies, and PE portfolios run roughly 83% services versus 17% goods, compared with a near-even split for the MSCI index.

A STRUCTURAL IDEA ALREADY TAKING SHAPE ELSEWHERE

Schroders also floats what it calls “hybrid continuation investment” structures, an incumbent GP retaining control of a company’s transformation while a second fund manager takes a partial stake to contribute a specific capability, such as regional expansion or IPO preparation. Jasmin Capital’s most recent market newsletter describes a similar structure already in use, sometimes called a co-control continuation vehicle: 50% of a company is sold to a new sponsor through a competitive M&A process, and the remaining 50% is rolled into a continuation vehicle managed by the incumbent GP at the price set by that process. It’s a genuine innovation worth watching either way, the concept of splitting control between an exiting-price-setting sponsor and a continuing incumbent may be more consequential than either single research note suggests on its own.

_{Sources: Schroders Capital, "Continuation investments continue to grow – and to reshape the buyout market," In Focus, June 2026 (Nils Rode, Petr Poldauf, Eufemiano Fuentes Perez). Coller Capital, Global Private Capital Barometer, 44th Edition, Summer 2026. ILPA, 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (comment period draft). Ares Management, "Why Now for GP-Led Secondaries," June 2026. William Blair Private Capital Advisory, Q2 2026 Quarterly Newsletter. Jasmin Capital, Newsletter N°13/2026. Underlying market data via Preqin, Pitchbook, Jefferies, Greenhill, Evercore, Lazard and PJT.}

The comparison Eurazeo itself draws is the telling one: ESF V’s predecessor closed at €1 billion in 2021. A single vintage more than doubling in five years is not typical growth for a mature strategy; it’s a re-rating. Eurazeo credits “growing investor demand for its disciplined strategy and differentiated market positioning” — read: a European mid-market secondaries book that institutional allocators are increasingly willing to pay up for, at a moment when the largest global platforms (Ardian, Coller, Lexington, AlpInvest) continue to absorb most of the headline fundraising.

Who wrote the checks

The commitment base spans sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, financial institutions, family offices and private wealth clients — a diversification Eurazeo highlights as evidence of broadening secondaries adoption beyond the traditional institutional LP base. Private wealth’s presence on that list is consistent with the broader retailization trend running through the secondaries market over the past two years, as managers built feeder structures to bring evergreen and wealth-channel capital into strategies historically reserved for large institutions.

“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

“Against a volatile market backdrop, we are seeing a record level of opportunities, and ESF V is already well into its deployment phase.”

— Amine Rais, Partner, Secondaries & Mandates, Eurazeo

The platform context

ESF V’s close lifts Eurazeo’s Secondaries & Mandates AUM past €6.4 billion, now 17% of the Group’s roughly €39 billion in total assets under management — a business line built by a dedicated team of more than 30 professionals covering both GP-led and traditional LP secondaries. For a diversified manager whose broader identity is private equity, private debt, real estate and infrastructure, secondaries is becoming a proportionally larger and more strategically load-bearing piece of the platform.

This is not a niche product anymore. CVs have become a structural feature of how private equity manages portfolios and delivers, or defers, liquidity. And yet, the market’s rapid expansion has outpaced the governance frameworks designed to protect the LPs who must decide, repeatedly and under time pressure, whether to sell or roll.

ILPA’s newly released 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (open to comments until August 5th) is the industry’s most serious attempt yet to close that gap. It is also, notably, a document whose timing is not accidental.

Why the Market Got Here

The structural driver is not complicated: too much capital, held too long, generating too little cash. The stock of unrealized assets across global private equity portfolios has reached approximately $3.8 trillion, roughly 32,000 companies. Holding periods at exit are now hovering around seven years, up from five to six years in the prior cycle. For the critical 2018–2021 fund vintages, which should currently be in their peak harvest period, DPI levels are reportedly as low as 0.1x to 0.3x.

“DPI has overtaken IRR as the metric that drives LP re-up decisions. Managers who can’t show progress toward at least 1.5x paid-in capital by year eight face a difficult fundraising conversation, regardless of the unrealized value generated.”

Against that backdrop, the cumulative LP cash flow deficit has reached $260 billion since 2022, according to Carlyle AlpInvest’s analysis. Distributions have recovered somewhat from their 2023 lows but remain roughly half the levels investors became accustomed to in prior cycles. The practical consequence: LPs are capital-constrained precisely as they face a wave of GP fundraising asks and, increasingly, CV sell-or-roll decisions.

GPs, meanwhile, have found CVs to be a genuinely useful tool in this environment. They allow high-conviction assets to be held longer without forcing a distressed sale. They offer LP optionality, cash out or roll, rather than a binary fund liquidation. And, critically, they allow carry to crystallize and be redeployed into succession planning. According to Bain’s 2026 Midyear PE Report, GP-led CVs grew 62% year-over-year, and 37% annually since 2022. Roughly 25% of GPs have recently launched or completed a CV; about 40% expect to explore one in the next one to two years.

The problem is that growth at this speed and scale, in a product that is, by definition, a related-party transaction, has created documented friction between GPs and their LPs.

LP Sentiment: Structural, Not Cyclical

The Coller Capital Summer 2026 Barometer, the 44th edition of the survey, published June 24, provides the clearest read on where LPs actually stand. The findings are striking, and not in the way CV optimists would hope.

The data point that matters most: 69% of LPs expect CV activity to either increase or hold at current levels, even as traditional exits recover. This is not a temporary workaround. It is a permanent feature of the private equity landscape. LPs know this, which is precisely why governance matters so much. CVs are not going away. The question is whether the processes around them will be made fair.

The same Barometer documented mounting LP concerns about process quality: inconsistent and late disclosures, compressed election windows, and transactions initiated without credible commercial rationale. A separate April 2026 ILPA poll found that a majority of LPs begin to lose confidence in a GP when the discount to the last reported mark exceeds 5% on a full exit — a threshold that many CVs have tested. These are not abstract complaints. They are the conditions that created demand for exactly the kind of framework ILPA has now produced.

The ILPA Response: From Principles to Enforcement

ILPA’s 2023 guidance established principles. The 2026 update operationalizes them. The shift in tone is deliberate and significant.

The document opens with a statement that sets the frame for everything that follows: CVs are “perceived overuse or misuse as an exit mechanism, often initiated with little to no disclosed commercial rationale, coupled with inconsistent and late disclosures, and processes that fail to represent a commitment to GP alignment with existing fund limited partners.” This is not a hedged observation. It is an indictment of a pattern of behavior that has become common enough to require a structural response.

The guidance is organized around three non-negotiable principles:

Each of these principles addresses a specific failure mode that has become common in practice. The “deliberate not default” standard targets CVs launched because the exit environment was difficult, not because the GP had a compelling case for continued ownership. The “no worse off” principle targets fee and carry structures that incrementally disadvantaged rolling LPs. The information symmetry standard targets the scenario, frequently reported by LPs, where new CV investors received better diligence access than the existing LP base being asked to make a sell-or-roll decision.

The Conflicts Section Is the Sharpest Part

On conflicts of interest, the guidance takes its clearest stand. The central problem of a CV is structural: the GP is simultaneously the selling agent (representing the existing fund) and the buying agent (managing the new CV). This cannot be eliminated. But, ILPA argues, it can be properly disclosed and managed, and the burden is entirely on the GP to do so.

The guidance’s most consequential line: “GPs should not rely on any pre-clearance conflict waivers in LPAs.” Every conflict must be identified, disclosed, and brought to the LPAC for explicit approval, regardless of what the fund documents technically permit. This is a direct rejection of the practice, increasingly common as CVs proliferated, of GPs treating LPA pre-clearance provisions as a shortcut around substantive conflict management.

“A GP should not assume its LPAC will always waive CV transactional conflicts. If processes are poorly managed, suffer from incomplete or delayed information, or overly compressed timelines, there is a greater risk that an LPAC will reject or condition its clearing of conflicts.”

The guidance also addresses an increasingly common conflict that has received little formal attention: LPAC members whose affiliated secondaries businesses are independently bidding on the CV. These members sit at the intersection of multiple conflicts, as LP fiduciaries, as potential buyers, and as LPAC gatekeepers for the very transaction they’re evaluating commercially. The guidance makes clear this must be managed separately, with full disclosure and appropriate recusal where warranted.

Regulators are watching. The SEC and the UK Financial Conduct Authority have both intensified scrutiny of GP conflicts in GP-led transactions. ILPA’s guidance effectively pre-empts regulatory intervention by setting an industry standard, but that standard now also serves as a reference point for regulatory expectations.

The Companion Documents: Where Principle Becomes Practice

Three supporting documents give the guidance operational weight in ways that prior ILPA publications did not achieve.

The GP Checklist for LPs converts the guidance into a yes/no disclosure framework that GPs are expected to complete at each stage of the CV process-covering commercial rationale, conflicts, pricing methodology, election mechanics, and LP rights. In practice, this is a document LPs can put in front of a GP at the outset of any CV process and request completed answers before the election clock starts.

The LP Evaluation Questionnaire structures the sell-or-roll decision across four dimensions: process integrity (was a competitive bid run? were advisors conflicted?), economics and valuation (does the price reflect a fairness opinion? how has the multiple trended quarter-over-quarter?), structure and terms (do existing side letters transfer? what are the carry and fee implications on an annualized basis?), and alignment (is 100% of crystallized carry rolling? is portfolio company management participating?).

The CV Transaction Timeline maps the ideal process from initial GP portfolio review through LPAC engagement, bid process, election, and closing. It establishes a critical sequencing principle: LP notification must begin at the moment the GP first incurs CV advisory costs, not once the transaction is substantially structured and the timeline is compressed.

LP MINIMUM STANDARDS - KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE GUIDANCE

• Require the fully completed ILPA Disclosure Template before the election period begins

• Demand no less than 30 business days for the election window, with unrestricted data room access throughout

• Confirm that existing side letters transfer to the CV on equivalent or better terms

• Verify that management fee and carry structures leave rolling LPs no worse off in absolute terms

• Require an anonymized summary of all final-round bids, including pricing structure and key commercial terms

• Confirm crystallized carry and GP sponsor commitment returns are reinvested in the CV

• Ensure roll elections are not conditioned on minimum commitments or stapled financing

• Request independent third-party price validation and a fairness opinion

What Changes and What Doesn’t

ILPA’s guidance is best practices, not regulation. No GP is legally compelled to follow it. But that framing understates its practical significance in several ways.

First, the document now serves as a reference standard in LPAC negotiations. LPs who arrive at an LPAC meeting with ILPA’s checklist and a list of gaps to fill have a credible, industry-endorsed framework behind them. GPs who deviate from it must explain why, which is a substantially higher bar than the prior norm of simply presenting a CV on whatever terms the GP preferred.

Second, LPAC dynamics have shifted. The guidance explicitly empowers LPACs to condition conflict approval on process remediation, on better information, longer timelines, clearer rationale. An LPAC that uses this authority is not being obstructionist; it is following published best-practice guidance. That changes the politics inside these transactions.

Third, the regulatory environment is moving in the same direction. Both the SEC and the FCA have signaled increased focus on GP-led transaction conflicts. ILPA’s guidance effectively creates an industry compliance baseline that regulators can reference, and that GPs ignore at their own risk.

For GPs, the practical implication is front-loaded investment. Early LPAC engagement, earlier LP notification, fuller documentation of alternatives considered, and a standing CV policy shared with LPs during fundraising. The guidance signals that the era of launching a CV with limited commercial context and a compressed election window is structurally over, not because it will always be stopped, but because the friction and reputational cost of doing so will increasingly outweigh the convenience.

For LPs, the guidance provides both a minimum standard and a negotiating tool. The side letter implications are particularly important: LPs should now incorporate minimum CV election periods, mirror reporting requirements, information-sharing floors, and mirror tax treatment into their standard side letter templates for future commitments. The time to negotiate these protections is during fundraising, not when the CV process is already underway.

The Structural Bet

The 2026 guidance arrives at a moment when the continuation vehicle market is, by most projections, still in its growth phase. Projections from multiple sources suggest CVs could represent 30% to 40% of all private equity exits within two years. The $3.8 trillion backlog of unrealized assets is not clearing quickly, and for the 2018–2021 vintages under the most LP pressure, CVs remain one of the few mechanisms that can return capital without forced sale conditions.

The Coller Barometer data points to why this matters beyond the immediate cycle: 69% of LPs expect CV activity to hold or increase even as exit markets recover. This is not a market expecting CVs to revert to a niche use case once conditions normalize. It is a market pricing in CVs as a permanent feature of how private equity works, and adjusting its governance expectations accordingly.

ILPA’s 2026 guidance is, in that sense, not just a response to current market conditions. It is the industry’s attempt to build the institutional infrastructure, standards, checklists, templates, timelines, that a permanent, high-volume CV market requires to function with genuine LP-GP alignment rather than the adversarial friction that has characterized too many transactions in the recent cycle.

The comment period closes August 5, 2026. Both LPs and GPs have until then to shape the final version. Given what’s at stake, the participation rate should be high.

_{Sources: ILPA 2026 Continuation Vehicle Guidance (comment period draft); Coller Capital Global Private Capital Barometer, 44th Edition, Summer 2026; Bain & Company Private Equity Midyear Report 2026; Carlyle AlpInvest, Global Private Markets Quarterly; Lazard 2025 Secondary Market Report; Ares Management secondaries research. Market volume data from Jefferies and Lazard annual secondary market reviews. All figures in USD unless otherwise noted. This article reflects analysis and editorial interpretation by Secondary Scoop; it does not constitute investment advice.}

Coller Capital’s Summer 2026 Global Private Capital Barometer offers the clearest LP-level rebuttal of that argument to date. When asked what happens to CV activity when traditional exit channels improve, 40% of LPs said it will continue to increase. Another 29% expect it to stay at current levels. Just 31% anticipate a decline.

That means 69% of LPs expect CV volume to hold or grow regardless of exit conditions. The cyclical thesis is effectively dead.

Why the exit timing gap makes CVs permanent

The structural case for CVs doesn’t rest on market dysfunction. It rests on a more fundamental problem: LPs and GPs have different clocks.

The Barometer makes this tension quantifiable. When asked whether GPs are correctly balancing liquidity needs against portfolio company value creation, only 40% of LPs said the balance is about right. Thirty-nine percent said GPs are not providing liquidity early enough. A further 22% said the best companies are being sold too soon.

Read those numbers carefully. Sixty percent of LPs are dissatisfied with exit timing — but they’re dissatisfied in opposite directions. Nearly two-fifths want liquidity faster. More than a fifth want GPs to hold longer. That’s not a problem with a single solution. That’s a structurally heterogeneous LP base with irreconcilable holding period preferences sitting inside the same fund.

Continuation vehicles are the mechanism that resolves this. By offering LPs the choice of selling for liquidity or rolling to retain exposure, CVs allow a single GP decision — hold the asset — to accommodate both outcomes simultaneously. An LP that needs DPI can exit. An LP that believes in the remaining value creation story can roll. Neither has to override the other.

That logic doesn’t disappear when exit markets improve. If anything, it becomes more relevant when GPs have genuine optionality — when the choice to run a CV reflects conviction about an asset’s trajectory rather than an inability to find a buyer elsewhere.

The normalization of CV acceptance

What’s changed in LP sentiment is not just tolerance for CVs but active expectation of them as a portfolio management tool. The Barometer describes CVs as having “gained acceptance among LPs as an established feature of private markets.” That language matters. Established feature is meaningfully different from necessary evil.

This shift has been gradual but consistent. Early CV transactions — particularly single-asset vehicles in the 2018–2020 period — faced significant LP skepticism around conflicts of interest, valuation integrity, and GP motivations. ILPA guidance, increased use of independent advisors, and more standardized process norms around fairness opinions have progressively addressed those concerns. LPs are better equipped to evaluate CV terms than they were five years ago, and the market infrastructure around these transactions has matured accordingly.

The result is a cohort of LPs who are no longer reacting to CVs defensively but incorporating them into their portfolio planning. When 40% of your LP base expects CV activity to keep growing in a recovered exit environment, you’re no longer looking at a crisis instrument. You’re looking at standard toolkit.

What this means for secondary market structure

The permanence of CV activity has direct implications for how the secondary market develops over the next cycle.

GP-led volume — of which single-asset and multi-asset CVs are the dominant form — has grown from a marginal share of secondary transaction volume to roughly half of total market activity over the past several years. If LP sentiment in the Barometer is directionally correct, that share is unlikely to compress back toward historical norms even as LP-led volume also grows.

That has consequences for secondary fund positioning. Buyers that built capabilities specifically around GP-led transactions during the 2019–2023 buildout are not holding a cyclical skill set. They’re holding infrastructure for a permanent market segment. Conversely, traditional LP-led focused buyers face a secondary market where their historical edge — portfolio pricing, relationship-driven sourcing — is a smaller proportion of available deal flow than it once was.

The Barometer also flags private credit secondaries as the asset class LPs expect to see the greatest proportional growth in the secondary market over the next three years, ahead of private equity. If CV structures migrate into private credit at scale — which the growth of NAV lending and credit fund continuation structures suggests is already beginning — the GP-led market expands further beyond its buyout origins.

The thesis, restated

The argument that CV volume is a distressed-market phenomenon has always been partly wrong. It conflated the conditions that accelerated CV adoption — a closed exit environment from 2022 through much of 2024 — with the underlying structural driver, which is the mismatch between LP holding period heterogeneity and traditional closed-end fund structures.

Coller’s Barometer is the first major LP sentiment survey to capture this distinction cleanly in the data. When 69% of LPs expect CV activity to hold or grow in a recovered market, they’re not describing a temporary accommodation. They’re describing a permanent repricing of how GP-LP relationships manage the end of the investment period.

The cycle argument for CVs is over. The structural argument is just getting started.

Source: Coller Capital Global Private Capital Barometer, Summer 2026 (44th Edition). Survey conducted February 18 – April 21, 2026, across 108 LPs overseeing $2.045 trillion in AUM. Editorial note: Coller Capital is a secondary fund manager with $54 billion in AUM and a direct commercial interest in secondary market growth. Data points are sourced directly from the report; structural interpretations are Secondary Scoop’s editorial framing.

KKR’s mid-year outlook for 2026 — an 89-page macro report — doesn’t mention secondaries once. But buried in its asset allocation calls is one of the cleaner arguments we’ve seen for why GP-led volume should keep growing through 2027.

The setup is the 2021 vintage.

KKR flags it explicitly, and repeatedly, as the market’s most structurally compromised cohort. Deals underwritten at peak multiples, unusually low base rates, loose documentation, and revenue growth assumptions that no longer hold. Their words: transactions “structured for a world that no longer exists.” They expect fewer sponsor-to-sponsor deals from this vintage, and they’re watching defaults in private credit — by Fitch’s definition, which includes PIK and extensions — running around 5% since mid-2024.

This is the feedstock for the GP-led market.

When a GP holds a 2021-era asset that can’t trade at original underwriting assumptions, and traditional exit routes — IPO, strategic sale, sponsor-to-sponsor — are either closed or value-destructive, the continuation vehicle becomes the rational tool. Not distress. Portfolio management. The secondary market’s core thesis, playing out in real time.

KKR adds another layer. Their macro framework — what they call the “Divergence Conundrum” — describes an environment where growth and capital access are increasingly concentrated in fewer sectors. AI, national security, high-end services. Everything else faces what they characterize as rolling recessions. In that environment, a GP with a mixed 2021-era portfolio has a legitimate structural problem: some assets are compounding well, others are stranded. The continuation vehicle lets them separate the two. It’s not a workaround. It’s the correct answer.

There’s also a rate context worth noting. KKR expects the Fed on hold through 2026, with only one cut in 2027. Higher-for-longer isn’t the crisis scenario anymore — it’s the base case. For any sponsor still waiting for rate normalization to unlock exits or refinancing, the wait is getting longer. That pressure redirects toward solutions that don’t depend on a rate tailwind: NAV facilities, GP-leds, structured equity.

None of this is speculative. The conditions KKR describes — concentrated earnings, stalled exit markets, bifurcated credit, 2021 overhang — are the same conditions secondaries advisors have been navigating for the past 18 months. What the report provides is macro confirmation from one of the largest PE firms in the world, written for LPs and allocators.

The secondaries market doesn’t need KKR to validate it. But when a firm of that caliber publishes a 89-page outlook that inadvertently describes the structural case for GP-led supply growth, it’s worth reading between the lines.

The pipeline isn’t slowing down. The macro is building it.

What is a continuation vehicle?

A continuation vehicle is a new fund a manager creates to buy assets out of one of its existing funds. Investors in the original fund choose to cash out at an agreed price or roll their interest into the new vehicle. The manager keeps running the assets and usually commits fresh capital alongside a lead secondary buyer.

In private credit, the point of the structure is liquidity. A continuation vehicle lets a manager return capital to investors who want it while holding performing loans for longer on behalf of those who stay in. Unlike private equity continuation vehicles, which tend to center on one or a few prized assets, credit continuation vehicles are usually diversified, full-fund pools of loans.

Why continuation vehicles are growing in private credit

The driver is a gap between when loans mature and when investors expect their money back. Private credit funds typically run on an eight-year term with a four-year investment period. Loans written late in that window can outlast the fund, and slower repayment has pushed distributions down. Ares estimates that 2019-vintage private credit funds have returned only about 70 percent of invested capital so far, a DPI of roughly 0.7x.

Private Credit DPI Multiple by Vintage

When distributions slow, managers need another way to deliver liquidity. Continuation vehicles supply it without forcing a sale of good loans into a weak market. The same structure lets managers keep assets they still rate highly, and it can open conversations that feed the next fundraise.

Adoption has been fast. As Luca Salvato, Partner and Co-Portfolio Manager at Ares Credit Secondaries, put it:

“Private credit continuation vehicle transactions have been embraced at a significantly faster pace than we have historically seen in other secondary asset classes. The growth in capital formation now enables GPs to adopt this technology at scale and offer a new and attractive liquidity option to their LPs.”

How big is the credit secondaries market?

Credit secondaries are one of the fastest-growing segments of private markets, though they remain small next to the roughly $2 trillion private credit market behind them. Total credit secondaries volume reached about $20 billion in 2025, close to double the prior year, a figure that McKinsey, Carlyle AlpInvest, Apollo, and Ares all converge on.

GP-led activity, which in credit is mostly continuation vehicles, did most of the work. McKinsey reports GP-led volume tripled year over year to about $12 billion in 2025, or 60 percent of the total. Dedicated capital has followed. Carlyle AlpInvest estimates around $20 billion of dry powder is now committed to credit secondaries, and Ares raised $7.1 billion for its credit secondaries strategy in January 2026, its largest inaugural fund to date.

What LP demand looks like

The clearest signal is deal size, and 2026 has produced a steady run of large closings. The year opened with Crescent Credit Solutions VII CV, a $3.2 billion vehicle led by Pantheon and announced in January 2026, which stands as the largest credit continuation vehicle closed to date. More have followed:

• Carlyle and Content Partners closed a single-asset continuation vehicle on 16 June 2026, giving investors in Carlyle’s Credit Opportunities funds the choice of liquidity or continued exposure to a film and television catalogue.

• Blue Owl led Veld Capital’s 355 million euro credit continuation vehicle, reported on 15 June 2026, one of a growing set of European credit CVs.

• Pantheon led a $1 billion continuation vehicle for Audax Private Debt in May 2026, built around first-lien senior secured loans.

• Ares led Antares Capital’s second continuation vehicle in March 2026, at more than $1.7 billion across 300 first-lien loans.

The European angle is worth watching. Ares has pointed to the activation of the European credit CV market, with several leading managers running scaled processes through 2025 and early 2026. The Blue Owl deal with Veld is a recent example.

Outlook

Forecasts vary but point the same way. Apollo expects credit secondaries to reach $50 billion or more within two to three years. Carlyle AlpInvest projects the market will pass $80 billion by 2030, with GP-centered deals, led by continuation vehicles, making up the larger share at around $55 billion. Every major house expects continuation vehicles to keep gaining ground as more managers treat them as a repeatable tool rather than a one-off fix.

Two things will shape how far the trend runs. The first is capital. At current deployment rates, Carlyle AlpInvest estimates only six to nine months of dry powder runway, so continued fundraising is needed to meet demand. The second is discipline. Because upside on credit is capped, returns are set largely at entry, which puts the weight on pricing and on underwriting the underlying loans rather than on a headline discount.

For now the direction is clear. Continuation vehicles have become the main engine of credit secondaries, and the deal flow of early 2026 suggests the market is still early in its growth.

Frequently asked questions

Are continuation vehicles a sign of distress? Usually not. In credit they are mostly used to manage fund life and provide liquidity around performing loans, not to offload troubled assets.

How is a credit continuation vehicle different from a private equity one? Private equity CVs tend to focus on one or a few assets. Credit CVs are usually diversified, full-fund portfolios of loans.

Who invests in these vehicles? Specialist credit secondaries funds lead most deals, often alongside the original manager, who rolls economics and sometimes commits new capital.

Sources:

• Ares Management, “The Rise of Continuation Vehicle Transactions in Credit Secondaries” (March 2026)

• Carlyle AlpInvest, “Credit Secondaries: Stepping into the Spotlight” (June 2026)

• Apollo, “Private Credit Secondaries” (June 2026)

• McKinsey Global Private Markets Review

• Carlyle and Content Partners press release (16 June 2026)

• Secondaries Investor, “Blue Owl leads Veld Capital’s 355m credit CV” (15 June 2026)

• Audax Private Debt and Pantheon (May 2026)

• Antares and Ares (March 2026); Crescent and Pantheon (January 2026)

Golding’s core argument will be familiar to anyone who has tracked the small-cap buyout thesis: less standardization means fewer competing bidders, wider pricing dispersion, and — for managers with the underwriting muscle to do the work — the potential for outsized returns. The flip side is that the same lack of standardization is where lower-end CVs go wrong.

The framing shift: CVs as toolkit, not workaround

The paper opens by dispatching what it calls an “outdated” view — that continuation vehicles are primarily a release valve for weak exit markets. Citing Preqin’s Private Equity in 2026 survey, Golding notes that 52% of investors now consider the GP-led secondaries strategy attractive and 38% are active as buyers or sellers, with single-asset CVs dominating that activity. KPMG’s estimate that continuation vehicles already represent roughly a fifth of sponsor-led exits is presented as confirmation that the structure has moved from cyclical patch to permanent fixture of the private equity lifecycle.

That framing aligns closely with the editorial position this publication has taken repeatedly: secondaries, including GP-leds, are portfolio management tools rather than distress signals. Golding’s contribution is to push that argument down-market, where — the paper argues — the dynamics are structurally different from the large-cap CVs that dominate headline volume figures.

Seven pitfalls, one underlying theme

The bulk of the paper is organized around a framework of seven recurring failure modes that Golding says it sees across cycles and geographies in the lower end of the market. The through line across all seven is that smaller CVs are more “situation-specific” — fewer standardized data rooms, more concentrated investor groups, and managers whose organizational capacity may not scale with the size of the vehicle relative to their existing fund program.

The governance lens: why rationale drives conflict management

The Linklaters-authored governance sections — credited to Martin Mager and Zornitsa Chorbadzhiyska — make a structural argument that’s worth flagging separately from the investment framework. Their point is that the sponsor’s inherent conflict in a GP-led deal (representing both the selling fund and the buying vehicle) isn’t resolved by documentation alone. Where the transaction rationale is genuinely credible — a defined growth phase, an operational transformation — disclosure tends to be more comprehensive and LPAC engagement “more constructive,” even where investors disagree on price. Where the rationale is weak, the paper argues, governance mechanisms get asked “to do more than they can realistically deliver,” and tensions surface as compressed timelines and selective disclosure.

This is a useful framing for LPs evaluating CV consents: the quality of the process itself can be read as a signal about the quality of the underlying rationale.

Practitioner notes: pricing, leverage, and the “bridge” toolkit

Beyond the seven pitfalls, the paper closes with three market-practice observations framed as neither risks nor opportunities in themselves, but as execution trends specialist investors are increasingly navigating:

Bridging valuation gaps — deferred consideration, earn-outs, and performance-linked instruments are described as most effective when negotiated early through trust-based GP dialogue, rather than bolted on late to win a competitive process.

Pricing convergence with M&A logic — Golding notes that GP-led pricing, historically anchored to discounts off last reported NAV, is increasingly converging with traditional M&A methodologies, including concurrent debt refinancings. W&I insurance use is rising but remains selective at smaller deal sizes, reflecting a cost-versus-risk-transfer trade-off.

Vehicle-level leverage as a value driver — or not — the paper is blunt that incremental structural leverage at the vehicle level “rarely enhances the underlying economics of the asset itself” in the lower-middle market, where value creation is operational rather than financial-engineering-driven.

The takeaway

Golding’s framework doesn’t break new conceptual ground for readers steeped in the GP-led literature — the tension between rationale and structure, the conflicted-sponsor problem, and the case for the small- and mid-market have all been made before by various secondaries platforms. What this paper does is package those arguments specifically around the European sub-€500 million segment, with a governance overlay from Linklaters that goes deeper on process design than most LP-facing secondaries marketing material typically does. For an audience increasingly asked to evaluate CV consent requests on tight timelines, the seven-pitfall checklist functions less as new insight and more as a structured diligence template — which may be exactly the point.

Founded in 2007 by Monte Brem, Thomas Keck, and Jose Fernandez — veterans of Pacific Corporate Group — StepStone began as a conflict-free private markets advisory serving institutional investors seeking bespoke portfolio construction. It listed on Nasdaq in 2020 and has since grown into one of the largest private markets platforms in the world. As of March 31, 2026, the firm was responsible for approximately $885 billion of total capital, including $233 billion in assets under management. Its client base spans the world’s largest public and private pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, family offices, and private wealth clients. The firm operates across four core asset classes — private equity, infrastructure, private debt, and real estate — through a combination of separately managed accounts, commingled funds, and, increasingly, semi-liquid evergreen vehicles targeting the private wealth channel. It employs approximately 1,090 people across 31 offices globally.

The Washington-based firm generated nearly $14 billion in capital formation in Q4 alone, capping a full fiscal year of $38 billion in gross AUM additions — its best twelve-month period on record. Fee-related earnings surpassed $100 million for the first time, reaching $105 million at a 40% margin. For investors and managers watching the secondaries space, the numbers carry a clear signal: the market for private equity secondaries — both LP-led and GP-led — remains structurally robust, institutional demand is accelerating, and the largest platforms are expanding capacity accordingly.

A wave of secondaries capital approaching activation

StepStone closed its flagship PE secondaries fund at $2.2 billion in initial commitments and its GP-led PE secondaries fund at $200 million in a first close. Together, these two vehicles account for $2.5 billion of the firm’s record $40 billion in undeployed fee-earning capital — and both are expected to activate within the next two quarters.

That activation matters beyond StepStone’s own income statement. When large secondaries funds of this scale move from fundraising into deployment mode, they become active buyers in the market, shaping pricing, deal flow, and the competitive dynamics for other secondaries managers. The infrastructure secondaries fund also saw approximately $300 million of additional closes, with retroactive fees already recognized this quarter.

On the venture side, StepStone’s SPRING fund — a semi-liquid evergreen vehicle giving individual investors access to late-stage venture secondaries — generated $1.2 billion in subscriptions in Q4, making March and April its two best months ever. CEO Scott Hart confirmed that May was tracking similarly.

The VC secondaries thesis: concentration and the AI tailwind

StepStone’s venture secondaries franchise is arguably the most strategically distinctive part of its secondaries business.

Head of Strategy Michael McCabe outlined a thesis built around the power law dynamics of venture capital: the top 100 venture-backed companies have driven close to 50% of total value creation over the past decade. StepStone’s response is to build deliberately concentrated secondaries portfolios targeting those assets — sourcing through LP-leds, GP-leds, and direct secondaries relationships with management teams and lead investors alike.

The portfolio composition reflects this approach. In the SPRING fund, the top 50 positions represent approximately 75% of total fund value. Of those 50 companies, roughly 75% carry direct AI exposure — spanning AI-native businesses, defense technology, space, cybersecurity, and fintech. For European LPs evaluating whether to allocate to US venture secondaries strategies, this concentration profile is both an opportunity and a risk to assess carefully.

The dedicated VC Secondaries Fund — StepStone’s institutional vehicle, which last raised over $3 billion — is returning to market “shortly,” according to the call. Its return will represent one of the larger VC secondaries fundraises in the market this year.

A fee structure change signals LP pricing power

Buried in the financial details was a disclosure worth noting for anyone tracking how secondaries fund terms are evolving. StepStone announced a prospective change to the fee structure of its flagship PE secondaries fund: lower management fees during the investment period, offset by higher fees after deployment is complete. The firm described this as aligning with “recent market practices” and mitigating the J-curve for LPs.

The isolated impact, according to CFO David Park, would be a three-to-four basis point reduction in the firm-wide blended commingled fund fee rate when the fund is fully raised and activated — expected to be offset by continued growth in higher-fee private wealth products. The present value of total fees is structured to be equivalent to the old terms.

The change is a small but meaningful data point. It suggests that LP pressure on fee structures in PE secondaries has reached the point where even the largest and most established managers are making concessions on investment-period economics. Whether this becomes the new market norm is worth watching across the next vintage of funds from peer managers.

The exit environment: secondaries as pressure valve

StepStone’s $936 million in net accrued carry — up 7% in the quarter — sits largely in mature, harvest-ready programs. Approximately 60% is tied to funds older than five years. Yet gross realized performance fees of $46 million were below recent quarterly paces, reflecting the continued drag from depressed M&A and IPO markets.

Management was candid about what is needed for a recovery: full exits, not just continuation vehicles or partial realizations. Both of those structures — which have become increasingly prevalent as GPs manage liquidity in the absence of traditional exit routes — allow capital to stay locked up even as some value is returned. The industry came into 2026 cautiously optimistic, only to face a fresh set of disruptions: AI uncertainty, concerns around private credit, and geopolitical instability. Full exit volume has not yet returned to historic norms.

In that context, StepStone was explicit that secondaries will continue to serve as a primary liquidity mechanism for both GPs and LPs. The logic is straightforward: as long as the exit environment remains constrained and LPs are focused on distributions, the demand side for secondaries transactions does not abate. The question for secondaries managers in 2026 and beyond is less whether deal flow exists and more whether pricing discipline and portfolio construction can hold through a period of macro volatility.

A European story, not just a US one

StepStone’s results are often read through a US lens — and understandably so, given that its private wealth platform and its venture secondaries franchise are predominantly American in character. But the firm’s European presence is substantial enough that its strategic priorities carry direct implications for the continent’s secondaries market.

StepStone has operated in Europe since 2005, and today runs seven offices across the continent — including London, Dublin, Rome, and Milan, which opened in 2025. Its EU-regulated subsidiary, StepStone Group Europe Alternative Investment Limited (SGEAIL), is authorized by the Central Bank of Ireland and manages €29.1 billion in AUM on behalf of European institutional clients, up from €20.6 billion in December 2022. The Dublin office alone employs 110 people — roughly 10% of the firm’s global workforce — and has doubled its headcount since 2021.

That footprint matters in the context of the secondaries pipeline described on the earnings call. When StepStone activates its flagship PE secondaries fund and its GP-led secondaries vehicle over the coming two quarters, SGEAIL will be among the entities through which European pension funds, insurance companies, and family offices gain exposure to those programs. European LPs are not just passive observers of this fundraising cycle — they are a core part of the capital base being assembled.

The Milan expansion is also a signal worth noting. Italy has become an increasingly active market for private markets distribution, particularly among private banks and family offices, and StepStone’s decision to establish a second Italian office alongside its Rome presence reflects a deliberate effort to deepen local relationships ahead of what the firm clearly expects to be sustained demand growth. Head of Europe David Jeffrey described it as part of a broader strategy of strengthening presence in Europe’s key financial hubs.

For European secondaries managers and LPs, the trajectory is legible: the largest global platforms are building permanent, regulated infrastructure on the continent, not simply parachuting in for fundraising cycles. The competitive and co-investment landscape in European secondaries will increasingly be shaped by firms operating at this scale.

StepStone’s results suggest the largest global platforms are navigating a difficult macro environment with notable confidence — and are actively expanding the European infrastructure to sustain that growth. The secondaries pipeline it is bringing to market — across PE, GP-led, infrastructure, and venture — represents one of the broadest and most capitalized programs globally. For European managers and LPs, the message is clear: the global secondaries market is entering a deployment cycle, and its gravitational pull will be felt on this side of the Atlantic.

Lindbäck is not a secondaries specialist. He is a direct buyout investor who spent three decades doing what the GPs on the other side of continuation vehicle transactions do. That is a deliberately different profile, and it tells you something about where Pantheon thinks the GP-led market is heading.

The Setup

Pantheon’s CIO Jeffrey Miller flagged in the firm’s January 2026 outlook that GP-led deal volumes were up over 30% in 2025, with the pipeline still strong despite record transaction volumes the two years prior. The firm’s read is structural rather than cyclical: GP-led solutions are becoming a permanent feature of how fund managers handle portfolios and liquidity, not a distress tool.

As that market matures, the transactions get more complex. Buying into a continuation vehicle means genuinely underwriting the underlying business, not just negotiating a NAV discount. Someone who has spent 25 years inside rooms where these decisions are made is more useful than another generalist secondaries buyer.

The TMT Angle

A large portion of European TMT buyouts from the 2019 to 2021 vintage are now aging in portfolios. Software businesses, digital transformation plays, technology-enabled services, many of them bought at elevated multiples with cheap debt and limited exit options today. The IPO window has been narrow. Strategic M&A selective. GPs holding these assets are under real pressure, with LP distributions running well below the ten-year average according to Pantheon’s own data.

The GP-led continuation vehicle is the logical answer for managers who believe in the asset but need a liquidity solution. Pantheon, with fresh capital from the 1.1 billion dollar close of its Secondary Opportunities Fund II in 2025, wants to be the buyer. Having Lindbäck in the room to underwrite the underlying TMT business is the edge.

What It Adds Up To

Pantheon’s January report is candid that the secondaries market is becoming more competitive and that generalist LP portfolio capability is being commoditized. The differentiation will come from sector depth, GP relationships, and the credibility to be a preferred partner in complex processes.

As their own January report puts it, in an increasingly competitive market it comes down to finding “a manager that has strong investment acumen, and the depth of relationships that enables them to source and diligence the best deals available.”

Lindbäck is Pantheon putting its money where its mouth is.

Two Continuation Funds, Powerfully Executed

Astorg’s entry into the GP-led secondaries market came from necessity as much as strategy. By 2022, IQ-EQ — a global investor services platform it had backed since 2016 — had become the last remaining asset in its fifth flagship fund, Astorg V. Rather than sell into a tepid exit market or extend the fund beyond its natural life, Astorg structured a €1.3bn continuation vehicle, bringing in AlpInvest Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management Vintage Funds as lead anchor investors. The vehicle closed heavily oversubscribed, with commitments from both existing Fund V LPs rolling their positions and new investors entering alongside a meaningful equity contribution from IQ-EQ management.

Two years later, Astorg returned to the continuation vehicle structure for Normec, a pan-European testing, inspection, certification and compliance (TICC) platform that had more than quadrupled in size since its 2020 acquisition, executing over 40 bolt-on deals. The €1.4bn Normec continuation fund — backed by CVC Secondary Partners, Pantheon, Lexington Partners and Eurazeo — was again oversubscribed, with sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and family offices participating alongside rolling Fund VII LPs. The investment thesis was explicit: extend the hold to pursue a US expansion plan that would roughly double the addressable market. By August 2025, Normec had entered the US through three acquisitions.

“Following the €1.3bn continuation fund raised to support IQ-EQ in 2022, establishing our second continuation fund for Normec marks a significant milestone for Astorg.”

François de Mitry, CIO, Astorg, July 2024

Both continuation vehicles demonstrated clear GP-led deal craft: high-quality assets with proven compounders, credible value-creation extensions, well-anchored by institutional secondaries investors and structured with meaningful GP and management co-investment. On paper, Astorg had built two pieces of exemplary GP-led dealmaking.

The Pivot to Buyer — and Its Unravelling

It was against this backdrop that Astorg, in late 2023, disclosed plans to launch GP Equity Solutions: a dedicated continuation fund strategy that would position the firm as a buyer of GP-led transactions, rather than solely a seller. The product was co-led by Sebastiaan Van Den Berg and Michal Lange, with a thesis focused on investing in high-quality global B2B companies held in continuation structures — precisely the type of assets Astorg knew intimately from its own deal history.

The logic was coherent in theory: who better to underwrite GP-led transactions than a firm that had just run two of them? But the market and LP community answered that question differently. By December 2024, Astorg had paused the blind pool fundraise for GP Equity Solutions, pivoting to focus on deploying capital already secured rather than raising more. Two months later, in February 2025, the firm disbanded the GP-led effort entirely. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the broader picture of Astorg’s strategic difficulties, the firm had been unable to raise sufficient capital for the effort and had to let go of the team it had hired to run it — a striking outcome in one of the secondaries market’s most favourable fundraising environments in years.

What the IQ-EQ Sale Now Hangs Over

The irony is that Astorg’s secondaries difficulties now shadow its primary business in a more consequential way. IQ-EQ — the asset at the centre of its first and most celebrated continuation vehicle — remains unsold as of mid-2026. The Financial Times reported that Astorg had been hoping to exit IQ-EQ last year at up to €9bn; that target proved unreachable. As of January 2026, Astorg had formally kicked off a sale process with lenders preparing roughly €2bn in leveraged loan financing for prospective buyers. Blackstone, Permira, Carlyle, EQT and TPG had all circled the asset at various stages. The current valuation expectation has settled around the €5bn mark — a meaningful reset from earlier ambitions.

This matters directly for Astorg’s LP relationships. The FT reported that the firm has been unable to reach first close on its ninth flagship fund — targeting at least €4bn — since launching it in November 2025, with few existing investors willing to re-up. According to the same reporting, the 2019 and 2016 flagship funds were valued at 1.5x and 1.7x net MOIC respectively as of late 2024 — below the 2x threshold the buyout market typically considers strong. The FT also reported that Astorg had appointed Goldman Sachs to explore a sale of the firm itself, though no transaction materialised; newer partners subsequently bought equity from co-founders Thierry Timsit and Xavier Moreno in a restructuring designed to preserve the firm’s independence.

“Fundraising for our latest flagship, launched in November 2025, is progressing in what remains a selective and competitive market environment.”

Astorg — Statement to the Financial Times, May 2026

The Structural Lesson for Secondaries

Astorg’s arc offers a precise illustration of a recurring tension in the GP-led market: the skills required to be a compelling seller of continuation assets — deal structuring, asset selection, LP alignment, GP-co-investment credibility — do not automatically transfer to the buy side of that market. Secondaries LPs are asked to make a fundamentally different underwriting decision than buyout LPs. They are not backing a GP’s forward deal pipeline; they are backing that GP’s judgment about the residual value of existing assets, often at a premium to NAV. The question “do I trust this GP to pick assets worth continuing to hold?” is distinct from, and in some ways harder to answer than, “do I trust this GP to do new deals?”

Astorg’s GP Equity Solutions faced the additional burden of being a new entrant in a secondaries market already crowded with multi-decadespecialists — Lexington Partners, Pantheon, AlpInvest, Ardian, HarbourVest — who have built allocation relationships, dedicated teams, and LP bases entirely separate from their PE primary businesses. For LPs evaluating a new secondaries fund manager, the presence of a large, established buyout operation on the same platform can raise as many questions as it answers: alignment of interest, capital allocation priority, team retention incentives, and whether the secondaries unit would receive preferential access to Astorg’s own continuation vehicles — a structural conflict that is difficult to resolve cleanly.

The Normec and IQ-EQ continuation funds, in contrast, were unambiguous successes as deal structures: high-quality assets, credible continuation theses, oversubscribed closes backed by the strongest names in secondaries. If IQ-EQ clears at or near €5bn in its current process, the continuation fund LPs will have done well. Normec’s US expansion is live and accelerating. The GP-led track record, taken on its own terms, is strong.

What Astorg discovered is that executing good GP-led deals and running a credible GP-led secondaries fund are related but distinct businesses. The market — specifically the LP community that funds secondaries strategies — draws a hard line between the two.

SOURCES

Reporting draws on Astorg company announcements; Secondaries Investor (Secondaries Investor / PEI Media); Bloomberg News; Reuters; Private Equity Wire; ION Analytics / Mergermarket; and reporting by the Financial Times (”Astorg’s flagship fundraise struggles as private equity braces for shakeout,” May 2026, by Alexandra Heal), which first reported the firm’s flagship fundraising difficulties, the GP Equity Solutions team departure, fund-level MOIC figures, the Goldman Sachs mandate, and the ownership restructuring. MOIC figures and the IQ-EQ exit price aspiration cited in this article are sourced solely from FT reporting and have not been independently verified by Secondary Scoop.