The Performance Baseline

EQT now presents four business lines with their own realized return metrics: Private Capital, Infrastructure, Real Estate, and Secondaries. For Secondaries — Coller Capital’s track record — the deck shows a 15% realized Net IRR and a 1.7x realized MOIC. Both are competitive numbers for a top-tier dedicated secondaries manager.

Although, the other three business lines show Gross MOIC. The endnote confirms that the 1.7x for Secondaries is actually Net MOIC. To put it in perspective: if Coller's MOIC were restated on a gross basis — as EQT reports for its other three strategies — the number would be higher than 1.7x. How much higher depends on the fee and carry structure, but the direction is clear. The Secondaries segment may be closer to its peers than the slide suggests.

The Financial Projections

Beyond performance, the Value Creation Day endnotes contain something more forward-looking: EQT’s own projections for what Coller Capital will contribute financially in 2026. These figures were disclosed as part of the transaction rationale at announcement in January, but their appearance in a capital markets day presentation — in the context of a firm talking to shareholders — gives them a different weight.

A ~50% fee-related EBITDA margin is notable even by alternative asset management standards. For context, the listed alternatives managers that most investors use as a reference point — StepStone, Hamilton Lane, Partners Group — typically report FRE margins in the 35–45% range. A 50% margin on a dedicated secondaries platform reflects the relatively lean operating model of a focused fund manager: Coller does not run a large direct investment team, does not require operational resources to manage portfolio companies, and benefits from the scale of managing large pools of capital with a relatively small professional headcount.

The $40bn fee-generating AUM figure is also important to contextualize. Coller’s total AUM at close is approximately $49bn — the gap between total AUM and fee-generating AUM reflects assets in older, winding-down funds that are past their fee-earning periods. The $40bn figure is the commercially relevant number: it is the base on which management fees are calculated and against which any new fundraising adds directly to fee revenue.

— EQT VALUE CREATION DAY 2026, CLOSING STRATEGIC SUMMARY

What the July 17 Report Will Tell Us

EQT’s H1 2026 half-year report — scheduled for July 17 — will be the first earnings release in which Coller Capital’s financials appear as a consolidated segment, assuming the transaction closes on its expected mid-to-late Q3 2026 timeline. There is a real possibility that the close happens after the H1 reporting date, in which case Coller will not yet be consolidated but EQT may provide a pro-forma view. Either way, July 17 is the first moment at which the secondaries strategy shifts from a transaction story to a business performance story.

The questions that report needs to answer — and that the Value Creation Day data now allows us to benchmark against — are straightforward. Is Coller’s fee-generating AUM on track to reach $40bn by year-end? Are revenues running at the $350–375m pace? And critically: how is the integration being structured — does Coller operate as a standalone segment with its own reporting, or does EQT fold it into a broader solutions-oriented line that makes segment-level performance harder to parse?

For secondaries market watchers, the integration of Coller into EQT is not just a consolidation story. It is the first test of whether a dedicated secondaries platform can maintain its performance edge inside a large, multi-strategy manager — a question the industry has not yet had to answer at this scale. The $3.2bn acquisition price implies a high bar. The 50% EBITDA margin tells you Coller is a structurally excellent business.

That sentence, from one of the most widely read institutional research firms in private equity, lands at a significant moment. GP-led secondaries volume reached $115 billion in 2025, according to Jefferies — up 53% year-over-year, with continuation vehicles representing 89% of that activity. The market has spent the better part of three years arguing that CVs have matured from an opportunistic tool into a structural feature of the private equity ecosystem. Bain’s midyear read suggests that structural case now faces a real test.

The mechanics of the friction

The report identifies the core tension clearly. A four-year stretch of record-low distributions has left LPs across the institutional landscape starved for cash. The implied capital cycle for the buyout industry now sits at approximately seven years — well above historical norms. Roughly one in five LPs, per an April 2026 ILPA poll cited in the report, are actively reducing their buyout allocations due to liquidity pressure or lower return expectations.

That creates an obvious appetite for liquidity solutions. The complication is that the same distribution drought has made LPs acutely sensitive to the price at which liquidity arrives. The report cites a separate ILPA poll finding that the majority of LPs begin losing confidence in a GP once an exit discount to last reported mark exceeds 5%. For GPs running continuation vehicle processes, this is a narrow corridor to navigate: LPs need liquidity, but not at a price that calls their portfolio marks into question.

The result is a self-reinforcing tension. GPs are reluctant to bring assets to market at discounts that would undermine LP confidence in their valuation discipline. LPs, meanwhile, are increasingly skeptical of marks on assets that were underwritten before the pandemic and have since weathered inflation, rate hikes, trade disruption, and now AI-driven uncertainty. The longer an asset sits — and Bain’s data shows that a majority of buyout NAV in North America and Western Europe comes from assets acquired in 2021 or earlier — the more that skepticism compounds.

A harder market for second-tier assets

Bain is careful to note that the secondary market is not broken. High-quality assets with strong strategic value continue to clear, and at strong prices. The friction is concentrated in what the report calls “a second tier of assets” — older or more challenged positions where buyers cannot get comfortable with proposed marks given uncertainty about future performance.

This has direct implications for the CV market. The continuation vehicle as a product was built, in part, on the premise that it allows GPs to ring-fence their best assets and offer LPs a clean choice: roll or exit at fair value. That logic holds for genuinely premium assets. For the broader portfolio of aging positions — the 2018–2021 vintages that have been through years of disruption without producing distributions — executing a CV process that satisfies LP price expectations is becoming structurally harder.

The MSCI data in the report offers some counterweight. More than 75% of buyout assets are still exiting above their next-to-last quarterly mark, broadly consistent with historical patterns. The relationship between marks and realized exit values has, so far, held up better than LP perception might suggest. But perception matters in fundraising, and LP confidence in GP marks is an input to every CV negotiation.

Our Secondaries’ read

The Bain report does not cover secondaries market volumes or fundraising — for that, the Jefferies and Evercore annual reviews remain the primary sources. What it adds is a granular picture of the LP behavior dynamics feeding into secondary deal flow: the distribution drought, the valuation sensitivity, the mounting pressure on aging portfolios.

The 5% markdown tolerance threshold from the ILPA poll is the most operationally specific data point in the report for secondaries practitioners. It quantifies, with survey evidence, the pricing band within which GP-led processes must operate to preserve LP relationships. As CV volume scales and the asset quality distribution widens — from flagship single-asset processes to older, more challenged fund restructurings — that 5% ceiling will be tested with increasing frequency.

Bain’s warning on CV execution difficulty is not a prediction of market reversal. It is a calibration: the easy part of the GP-led boom, when any high-quality asset could clear a CV process with LP support, may be giving way to a more selective, more negotiated, and more LP-scrutinized market. That is, ultimately, a sign of a maturing asset class — but maturation has friction costs, and 2026 is where those costs are beginning to show up.

Sources: Bain & Company, Private Equity Midyear Report 2026. ILPA Webcast Poll, April 2026. MSCI Private Capital Solutions. Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review, January 2026.

“We believe that the credit secondary market is $20 billion today and will grow to over $80 billion by 2030, implying significant runway ahead.” Michael Hacker, Global Head of Portfolio Finance, Carlyle AlpInvest

The firm projects the $80 billion market by 2030 will be driven primarily by GP-centered transactions (~$55 billion), with LP interest sales making up the remaining ~$25 billion.

What Is Driving the Growth

The rise of credit secondaries tracks directly with the growth of private credit itself. Since the Global Financial Crisis, banks pulled back from leveraged lending and private credit managers filled the gap. The overall private credit market now stands at nearly $2 trillion in AUM, growing at a 13% CAGR since 2012, with direct lending alone compounding at 25% over the same period.

As the primary market matured, so did the need for secondary solutions. Private credit funds carry structural duration mismatches: investment periods end, but loans originated late in the cycle often remain outstanding well beyond a fund’s contractual life. Since 2022, rising rates have pushed borrowers toward amend and extend solutions, lengthening loan lives further. LPs holding these funds increasingly need a way out that does not require waiting for natural portfolio runoff.

Perceptions have shifted accordingly. Selling a private credit fund interest used to signal distress. Today, both GPs and LPs treat secondary transactions as a routine portfolio management tool.

Carlyle Is Betting on It

Carlyle’s own commentary from its February 2026 Shareholder Update reinforces the conviction. Co-President John Redett, speaking about the AlpInvest platform, was direct: “Credit secondaries, portfolio finance, and insurance should further accelerate growth when we look forward.” He described the broader secondaries market as doubling in size every four to five years, a tailwind he called both secular and structural rather than cyclical.

That confidence is grounded in scale. They have 375 GP relationships, data on 30,000 companies, and a 25-year track record. Redett noted that 75% of GPs they speak to today plan to use the secondary market in the next two years, up from roughly 25% five years ago.

What Comes Next

The market is still early. A 1% turnover rate on nearly $2 trillion in AUM means current volume is a fraction of what could theoretically trade. Even a move to 1.5% turnover would imply a market roughly double its current size, and it would still trail private equity secondaries penetration rates.

The trajectory from here depends on continued growth in the primary private credit market, broader GP and LP adoption of secondary solutions, and a deepening buyer base with the expertise to underwrite credit risk properly. All three are moving in the right direction, and the largest players are already positioning credit secondaries not as a niche strategy but as a core part of how the private markets ecosystem will function going forward.

Ardian just published its 2025 Integrated Report — and as expected, we went straight for the secondaries section.

In 1996, when Dominique Senequier was handed a mandate to build a private equity business inside AXA, the European secondaries market barely existed. Today, Ardian runs the world's largest secondaries platform, with $97 billion in Secondaries & Primaries AUM, a 110-person team spread across 14 offices on three continents, and a proprietary database absorbing five million data points every quarter. The 30th anniversary of the firm is also, in many ways, the coming-of-age story of the secondaries market itself.

FROM NICHE TO NECESSITY

A Market That Remade Itself

The secondaries market of 2025 is structurally different from anything that existed even five years ago. Private equity secondary volume reached approximately $240 billion in 2025 — up roughly a third on 2024, and double the volume recorded in 2023. Ardian projects the market will double again within three years, driven by forces it describes as “getting stronger and reinforcing each other.”

The first force is structural over-allocation. As exits slowed in the higher interest rate environment that followed 2022, LP portfolios have matured without the liquidity events that would normally rebalance them. More than 80% of unrealized value in buyout funds has now been held for at least four years — the point at which exits would historically begin to flow. Instead, IRRs for recent vintages have declined across the industry, and portfolio sales to the secondary market have accelerated sharply.

The second force is behavioral. Over the past two years, more than half of all secondary market sellers have been first-time sellers — a cohort that barely existed a decade ago. Ardian’s observation, drawn from its own deal flow, is that first-time sellers typically return: once LPs complete an initial secondary transaction and recognize it as a portfolio management tool, they become recurring participants. This creates a compounding effect on deal supply that is independent of the exit environment.

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Scale, Relationships, Information — and Why They Compound

Ardian identifies three mutually reinforcing barriers to entry. Scale enables it to write large checks with certainty of execution — evidenced by ASF IX, a $30 billion oversubscribed close in January 2025. Relationships are deepened by Ardian’s dual role: through Ardian Customized Solutions, it is also a significant primary LP in the same funds it transacts on the secondary side. That positioning unlocks GP consent on transfers and generates company-level data flows competitors cannot replicate. Information — captured through quarterly GP interactions at company level, covering forecasts, business plans, and exit timing — feeds iBIP, the firm’s proprietary database. Ardian runs bottom-up LBO analysis on every underlying company in its portfolio each quarter, building what it describes as a permanent state of due diligence.

The result is an origination capability that is proactive rather than reactive: Ardian develops a live buy-list and approaches GPs and LPs directly to propose continuation fund structures or portfolio sales. The same names that led the secondaries market a decade ago still lead it today — Ardian argues this persistence reflects how difficult the underlying loop is to break into at scale.

2025 IN NUMBERS

ASF IX, SACVs, and a Loss Ratio Below 1%

Private wealth clients accounted for 22% of ASF IX commitments — a structural shift in the LP base the firm is building for deliberately. On risk-adjusted returns, the sub-1% loss ratio across approximately $50 billion deployed over more than 20 years is the headline figure Ardian offers in a market where investor scrutiny of performance metrics is intensifying.

In the GP-led segment, single-asset continuation vehicles generated more than $60 billion in deal flow in 2025, up roughly 70% year-on-year and up from just $3 billion in 2018. SACVs now represent approximately a quarter of total secondary market volume. Ardian completed its first continuation vehicle on the sell side in 2025 — Syclef, a refrigeration services platform held for five years by the Expansion team — and has deployed approximately $800 million as a buyer in this segment, with about $1 billion in dry powder allocated and a stated priority of increasing that firepower over the next two years.

ADJACENT MARKETS & OUTLOOK

Infrastructure Secondaries and What Comes Next

Infrastructure secondaries — approximately $28 billion in deal flow in 2025, growing at 33% CAGR since 2021 — is the segment Ardian describes as mirroring where buyout secondaries were a decade ago: earlier in the curve, growing rapidly, and structurally undercapitalized. The market expanded from $10 billion to $25 billion in just two years. Ardian's first infrastructure secondaries fund closed in 2015 at $525 million; the current generation is roughly 15 times larger and raising in half the time.

“Information cannot be bought. It can only be assembled, quarter by quarter over decades, by those that have the scale, the right relationships, and the team to draw on 26 years of investment judgment.”

— Ardian 2025 Integrated Report

When Rede Partners published its April 2026 report on the private equity opportunity in Poland, it was framed as a case for primary investment. The macro story is compelling — GDP above $1 trillion, growth running at three times the EU average, a $1.5 million-strong ecosystem of family-owned SMEs whose founders are approaching retirement age. But read between the lines, and what emerges is an equally compelling secondaries story: a market whose structural features are quietly assembling the conditions for a liquidity event that has not yet arrived.

Poland is the hub for private equity across the Central and Eastern Europe region, dominating transactions by value in 2024. PE firms have been established there for two decades. Yet the market remains conspicuously underpenetrated by international fund managers, and the LP base has historically been anchored by Development Finance Institutions rather than the diversified institutional pools that characterize more mature European markets. That combination — growing deal activity, limited LP diversity, and constrained exit infrastructure — is a familiar precursor to secondary market development.

The DPI Problem Is Real — and LPs Are Saying So

The most telling signal in the Rede report is not in the data — it is in the investor quotes. Multiple limited partners interviewed explicitly acknowledged that “consistent DPI generation has been hard” in the Polish and CEE market. That admission, from the LP community itself, is precisely the friction that creates secondary market demand. When distributions do not arrive on the expected schedule and fund lifecycles stretch, LPs look for alternative liquidity paths. In a market where IPO and trade sale activity is only now beginning to thicken, the secondary market is often the only viable route.

The exit data supports this reading. Sponsor-to-sponsor transactions — the category most directly connected to secondary market activity — represented only 13% of Polish PE exits in 2023 and 2024. The dominant exit routes were trade sales (45%) and public offerings (37%), with IPOs like Żabka and Diagnostyka generating headlines but not the consistent, scalable liquidity that institutional LPs require across a diversified portfolio. For LPs sitting in earlier-vintage CEE funds whose assets have not yet found buyers, the secondary market represents the only realistic path to capital return.

Entry Multiples That Secondary Buyers Should Know

The 30% discount between CEE deal multiples (6.7x EBITDA) and the broader European average (9.4x) is relevant to secondary buyers for a reason that goes beyond the obvious. When underlying portfolio companies were acquired cheaply, NAV marks are — in theory — more conservative and the buffer against secondary discount erosion is structurally wider. Secondary buyers pricing off NAV in funds with significant Polish or CEE exposure are, in effect, gaining access to assets that were themselves bought at a meaningful discount to Western European comps.

That discount exists for a reason: the GP landscape is thin. Rede’s own research indicates that only four players are operating in the midcap (€200–500 million) space across all of CEE. A shallow GP supply means limited price discovery, longer hold periods as GPs await the right buyer, and reduced competition at auction — all factors that secondary buyers can exploit when acquiring LP stakes or working through GP-led processes.

The Succession Wave as a Pipeline Driver

Poland’s 1.5 million family-owned SMEs, many founded in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Communism in 1989, are entering a generational transition. The founders are aging; their children, many of whom left for Western Europe and are now returning in a documented “reverse brain drain,” do not always want to run the family business. This succession dynamic has been a defining feature of Nordic PE market development — and the Nordics are today one of the most active secondaries markets in Europe.

LIMITED PARTNER, QUOTED IN REDE PARTNERS POLAND PE REPORT, APRIL 2026

The Nordic parallel is instructive beyond the succession angle. In the Nordics, as PE-backed mid-market businesses scaled and attracted a wider buyer universe, sponsor-to-sponsor deal volume rose steadily — overtaking family-to-sponsor transactions in 2025. If Poland follows a similar trajectory, the conditions for a functioning secondaries market — sufficient deal volume, maturing fund vintages, and a broader LP base seeking liquidity — would emerge within the next five to seven years. Secondary buyers who build relationships and pricing frameworks now would have a structural advantage when that moment arrives.

What the Market Still Needs

The honest assessment is that Poland is not yet a secondaries market — it is a market whose structural features are pointing in that direction. The GP base is too small, LP diversity is limited, and exit volumes, while growing (buyout exits rose 13% between 2019–21 and 2022–24), remain modest in absolute terms. The Warsaw Stock Exchange is reopening as an exit route, which is positive for DPI but reduces the pressure that would otherwise push LPs toward secondary solutions.

What would accelerate secondaries development in CEE is precisely what the Rede report documents as currently lacking: more international fund managers entering the market, greater LP diversity beyond DFI anchors, and continued growth in buyout deal volumes that creates larger and more liquid secondary positions to trade. Each of those conditions is, by the report’s own account, beginning to move in the right direction.

For secondary market participants, the question is one of timing. Poland in 2026 has the structural DNA of a market that will need secondary solutions — the succession overhang, the DPI gap, the entry multiple cushion, and the thin GP landscape. The deal flow is not yet there at scale. But in a market where being early is often the precondition for being well-positioned, the conversation is worth starting now.

Source: The Rede View on the private equity opportunity in Poland

The Market Behind the Move

Switzerland is one of the largest institutional investor markets in Europe relative to its size. Swiss pension funds alone manage over CHF 1.4 trillion in assets, and appetite for private markets is growing globally. According to the Natixis 2026 Institutional Outlook Survey, 39% of institutions plan to increase private equity allocations, 38% infrastructure, and 35% private debt. More broadly, 65% say private assets offer higher return potential than public markets, and 65% project a portfolio diversified with alternatives will outperform the traditional 60:40 mix.

The challenge for an outside manager is access. Swiss pension funds are relationship-driven, move carefully, and prefer counterparts who understand local regulatory and reporting requirements. As Beat Frühauf, Head of Switzerland at Golding, put it: the partnership “allows us to address institutional investors in Switzerland even more precisely and to leverage our strengths in implementation, from structuring to reporting”.

What the Partnership Actually Does

J. Safra Sarasin has been in Switzerland since 1841 and manages over USD 460 billion in client assets across the group. For Golding, which already has a Zurich office but is not yet a household name among Swiss pension allocators, attaching to that network is a meaningful shortcut. Daniel Graf, Head of Institutional Clients Switzerland at the bank, framed it as “opening up access for our clients to a broad spectrum of investment solutions, including selective co-investments and secondary opportunities”.

The Timing

Switzerland’s near-zero interest rate environment is pushing institutional capital further into alternatives. At the same time, the private markets industry is bifurcating between large generalist platforms and focused specialists. Golding, with EUR 15 billion under management across private equity, private credit, infrastructure, and secondaries, sits in an interesting position: large enough for complex mandates, specialized enough to offer genuine expertise. As Hubertus Theile-Ochel, Managing Director at Golding, noted, the partnership “underscores the strategic importance of the Swiss market” for the firm.

The Swiss market rewards exactly that positioning. The J. Safra Sarasin partnership gives Golding the local infrastructure to make the case.

H1 2026 builds directly on that momentum. The deals tracked by Secondary Scoop between January and May 2026 span four distinct asset classes — infrastructure, private credit, growth buyout and mid-market buyout — with disclosed sizes ranging from €155 million to €2.2 billion. What they share is the structural logic: a GP unwilling or unable to force an exit at a suboptimal moment, a high-conviction asset with further runway, and a secondary market with sufficient capital and sophistication to price the transaction fairly.

Critically, two of the five primary H1 2026 deals were first-ever continuation vehicles for their respective GPs — Latour Capital and Alantra Private Equity. That detail is more significant than it might appear. It marks the diffusion of the CV playbook beyond the large-cap buyout firms that pioneered it, into the European mid-market where the opportunity set is vast and the precedent-setting is only beginning.

"Continuation funds captured 24% of the total value of PE-to-PE exit transactions in Europe in 2025 — up from 8% in 2024. Invest Europe dedicated a standalone section to them for the first time."— Invest Europe Private Equity Activity Report 2025, May 2026

Infrastructure

1 deal · €2.2bn

The infrastructure segment produced the single largest transaction of the period, and one of the most structurally distinctive. Meridiam’s Europe Core Fund is not a GP-led CV in the traditional sense — it is a purpose-built liquidity window embedded into the design of a 25-year infrastructure mandate, demonstrating how the asset class is evolving its own variation of the continuation vehicle playbook.

The Meridiam transaction is notable for a second reason: alongside the institutional close, Meridiam launched its first retail-dedicated infrastructure fund, Meridiam Global Infrastructure Strategies, in partnership with Private Corner. The bundling of an institutional CV close with a retail feeder product is a structuring innovation that may become a template for other European infrastructure managers navigating the democratisation of private markets under ELTIF 2.0.

Private credit

2 deals · €480m + >$1bn

Private credit secondaries is the fastest-growing segment of the broader secondaries market — and H1 2026 produced both a GP-led CV and a dedicated secondaries fund close out of European managers. The asset class is maturing rapidly: where credit CV activity was once concentrated in US direct lending, European platforms are now producing their own structures with European collateral, European borrowers, and European institutional anchors.

Growth buyout

1 deal · €635m

The Verdane transaction is the cleanest expression of the canonical European GP-led CV in H1 2026: a Nordic growth specialist, a 10-year-plus relationship with a flagship asset, a sole-lead secondaries buyer with the conviction and mandate to underwrite a full multi-asset portfolio, and a significantly oversubscribed outcome. It also carries a notable structural footnote — Arrive Group is moving into a continuation vehicle for the second time, having previously been held in a prior Verdane structure as EasyPark before the 2025 Flowbird merger.

Mid-market buyout

3 deals · €155m + 2 undisclosed

The mid-market segment produced three of the five primary H1 2026 deals, spanning France, Spain and the UK. Two were first-ever CVs for their GPs — a structural milestone that signals the diffusion of continuation vehicles beyond the large-cap PE world into the heart of European mid-market private equity. The assets involved — a mission-critical Swiss industrial manufacturer, a UK legal services platform, and a Spanish clinical genomics group — reflect the breadth of sectors where GPs are now choosing extension over forced exit.

Prior period reference deals (H2 2025): Two high-profile European CVs closed in the second half of 2025 establish the pipeline context for H1 2026 activity and are included here for market completeness

The data covers PE and VC continuation funds contributing to the European Data Cooperative. Infrastructure funds, private debt funds, real estate funds and secondary funds of funds are explicitly excluded from Invest Europe’s universe. This is a critical methodological note: several of the largest European CV transactions of 2025–2026 — including Meridiam’s €2.2bn infrastructure continuation fund and Eurazeo’s €480m private debt CV — fall entirely outside the Invest Europe perimeter. The actual market is materially larger than the figures below.

01- Fundraising: €19.8 billion and +113%

European PE/VC continuation funds raised €19.8 billion in 2025 — more than double the €9.3 billion recorded in 2024, and representing the strongest year on record by a significant margin. The number of funds completing a capital raise rose to 48, up from 28 the year prior. The increase was not concentrated in a single segment: buyout, growth and generalist continuation funds all expanded, while venture-backed CVs contracted slightly.

CV Fundraising by region: France & Benelux leads

Geographic concentration is striking. France & Benelux accounted for €8.6 billion — 43% of all European CV fundraising in 2025 — more than the entire market raised just two years prior. UK & Ireland followed at €6.5 billion, with the Nordics at €3.2 billion, Southern Europe at €0.8 billion and DACH at €0.7 billion. CEE recorded no material CV fundraising.

France & Benelux’s dominance reflects the depth and maturity of the French mid-market buyout ecosystem — the same ecosystem that produced the Seven2 and Latour Capital continuation vehicles tracked in our H1 2026 deal log, which will be released tomorrow. UK & Ireland’s position in second place, at €6.5bn, is consistent with the UK’s role as the historic home of European large-cap buyout, where continuation vehicles have been used for longer and at larger scale. The Nordics at €3.2bn — led largely by growth equity managers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark — is proportionally the most striking figure: Nordic managers produce a share of CV fundraising roughly double their share of overall European PE fundraising.

DACH’s apparent contraction (from €1.0bn to €0.7bn) is worth monitoring, though caution is warranted: the DACH market is historically less transparent in its reporting, and the category may be undercounted.

"France & Benelux accounted for 43% of all European continuation fund capital raised in 2025 — more than the entire European market raised in any prior year."— Invest Europe / EDC, Private Equity Activity 2025

02- Investments: €9.9 billion into 69 companies

Continuation funds deployed €9.9 billion into 69 portfolio companies in 2025 — more than doubling the €4.7 billion invested across 32 companies in 2024. The buyout segment drove the expansion, with €9.3 billion deployed (94% of total) into 36 companies, up 19 companies from the prior year. Growth continuation fund investments reached €0.5 billion across 12 companies, and venture-backed CVs invested a negligible amount across 21 companies — declining slightly in company count but consistent with the very early stage of venture CV development in Europe.

03- Divestments: the 8% to 24% shift

The divestment data is the most structurally significant section in the Invest Europe CV report, and the one most likely to reshape how institutional LPs think about private equity exit modeling. In 2025, European private equity firms divested €19.7 billion worth of assets through sales to another PE firm. Of that total, 24% was sold to a continuation fund — up from 8% in 2024. By number of companies, 17% of PE-to-PE exits went via a continuation fund, up from 6%.

The 8%-to-24% move in a single year is not a rounding error or a statistical outlier. It is the result of a structural pipeline maturing simultaneously across three generations of European buyout funds: the 2012–2015 vintages nearing or exceeding their natural hold periods, traditional exit routes remaining subdued, and a secondary buyer universe that has spent two years accumulating dry powder and developing underwriting infrastructure for complex GP-led transactions.

The simultaneous fall in “sale to same PE firm / partnership fund” (from 18% to 12% of value) is also meaningful. It suggests that internal recycling of assets — transfers between an old fund and a successor fund managed by the same GP — is being replaced by properly structured, third-party-anchored continuation vehicles, which offer genuine LP optionality, independent pricing, and a clean governance process. The market is maturing in exactly the direction ILPA guidance anticipated.

Importantly, this data covers only exits classified as “sale to a PE firm” in Invest Europe’s taxonomy. Continuation fund activity embedded in other exit categories — for example, recapitalisations, partial realisations, or structures involving both debt and equity — would sit elsewhere in the data. The 24% figure is almost certainly an undercount of the true share of European PE exits involving CV mechanics.

04 How CVs fit into the broader 2025 picture

European private equity and venture capital raised a record-adjacent €147 billion in 2025 — the second-best year on record, behind only 2022’s €195 billion peak. Investments reached €135 billion into 8,457 companies, and divestments came in at €45 billion at historic cost across 3,324 companies. Buyout dominated as usual: €103 billion raised, €90 billion invested, €32.5 billion divested.

Within this overall picture, continuation funds represented 13.5% of total European PE/VC fundraising in 2025 — up from roughly 7% in 2024. On the investment side, the €9.9 billion deployed by CVs represented 7.3% of total PE/VC investment volume. These are not marginal percentages. CVs are now a double-digit line item in the European private capital budget.

What the 2026 data will tell us

Will growth CVs sustain the surge? The 750% increase in growth CV fundraising (€0.4bn → €3.4bn) and the addition of 12 new fund closes in a single year is either the start of a durable structural trend or a one-year catch-up from a cohort of overdue vintage funds. If the 2018–2021 European growth equity vintage is as large as it appears, there is a three-to-five-year pipeline of potential growth CVs still to come.

Will the 24% divestment share hold or accelerate? The jump from 8% to 24% in a single year is historically unprecedented in any segment of European PE exit data. Whether this normalizes at a new structural level around 20–25% or continues rising toward 30%+ will define how mainstream continuation vehicles become as a primary exit mechanism — and whether LPs begin discounting GP fundraising by the expected CV overhang.

Will Invest Europe expand the perimeter? The decision to exclude infrastructure and private debt from the CV data creates a growing blind spot as those asset classes increasingly use CV-style structures. Watch for whether the 2026 edition expands the methodology, which would produce an immediate and significant upward revision to European CV market size estimates.

Southern Europe watch. Southern Europe raised €0.8bn in CV capital in 2025 and received €0.6bn in CV investments — the smallest allocation of any major European region. With Alantra PE (Spain) completing its first CV in H1 2026, and several Italian and Portuguese growth managers approaching the end of their first fund generations, this may be the region with the largest relative catch-up potential heading into 2026–2027.

DACH contraction warrants explanation. DACH is the only European region to show a nominal decline in CV fundraising between 2024 and 2025 (€1.0bn → €0.7bn). The German, Austrian and Swiss mid-market is large and structurally underserved by continuation vehicle structures. Whether this is a data anomaly, a vintage timing issue, or a genuine structural lag will be important to assess as 2026 data accumulates.

Global VC investment reached $330.9 billion in Q1 2026, but most of that came from a small number of big AI rounds, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Waymo, and Databricks. KPMG reports just five US companies accounted for $188.6 billion of total global VC investment during the quarter.

This also impacts secondaries, as private company valuations are rising much faster than liquidity. AI companies are raising huge rounds, staying private longer, and pulling in more and more capital.

In Europe, PitchBook reports that AI accounted for 61.3% of all VC deal value in Q1 2026, with €13.4 billion invested in AI deals in a single quarter.

The problem is not that AI companies cannot raise money. The problem is that many investors still cannot exit. The IPO market was expected to improve in 2026, but the latest market reports show that the US IPO market came to a “grinding halt” after the conflict in the Middle East began. J.P. Morgan also noted that market volatility and concerns around AI disruption have made the IPO environment more difficult again.

This is where venture secondaries start to show their value.

PitchBook also shows that global institutional VC direct secondary deal value stayed strong at $15.9 billion in 2025, even while broader exit markets remained uncertain. Europe accounted for about 15% of that activity.

The logic is simple. If the biggest AI companies keep raising private money and delay going public, early employees, angel investors, seed funds, and early VCs still need ways to turn paper gains into real cash. And if IPOs and M&A remain slow, LPs also need ways to rebalance portfolios without forcing companies to sell too early.

The next wave of venture secondaries won’t just happen because struggling investors need cash. It’ll also happen because some startups are doing so well that they’ve stayed private for a very long time and become extremely valuable.

AI companies are making this even more common. The hottest companies are raising huge amounts of private money, so they don’t feel pressure to go public anytime soon. But investors still want a chance to own part of them.

So instead of waiting for an IPO, people buy and sell existing shares privately through “secondaries.”

Europe Offers A Preview of Where the Market May Go

PitchBook estimates that the European institutional VC direct secondaries market could reach $47.5 billion in its base-case scenario. There are still obstacles around governance, transfer approvals, and pricing transparency, but the market direction is becoming clearer.

Another important piece of the story is venture debt.

The New Liquidity Mix: Equity, Debt, and Secondaries

European venture debt reached €5.9 billion in Q1 2026, while average deal sizes jumped from €35.9 million in 2025 to €90.5 million this year. AI companies represented 56.9% of total venture debt deal value.

Venture-backed companies are no longer depending on one liquidity path. They are raising mega-rounds, adding venture debt, delaying IPOs, and creating greater demand for partial-liquidity solutions along the way. Direct secondaries are becoming the pressure-release valve for the venture market.

The bottom line is that AI is not only changing how venture capital is invested. It is also changing how venture investors eventually get liquidity. The more money flows into a small number of private AI leaders, the more important secondaries become for founders, employees, early investors, and LPs.

In the past, when people sold shares in private startups, it often looked like they were losing confidence and wanted to leave.

Now it often means the opposite: they invested early in a company that became very successful, and their shares are valuable enough that others want to buy them.

This article looks at what is actually driving that shift, how different transaction types are contributing to scale, where the market is still constrained, and what the current data implies about how secondaries will evolve relative to traditional exit paths.

US venture secondaries reached $91.7 billion in 2025, and combined with GP-led venture secondaries, we have a total of $106.3 billion. That number should be understood in context. As recently as 2024, total annual secondary volume was closer to ~$50 billion. The market has effectively doubled in a short period, and the acceleration has been consistent across multiple quarters rather than driven by a single event.

Direct secondaries account for the majority of this activity. PitchBook estimates a range of $62.5 billion to $120.9 billion for direct transactions alone. The width of that range reflects incomplete visibility into private transactions, not volatility in demand. Across datasets, directionality is consistent: volume is increasing, and dispersion is narrowing over time as more transactions move through intermediated platforms.

At this level, secondaries are now operating at a scale comparable to traditional exit channels. This is particularly visible when compared to IPO markets, where annual VC-backed issuance remains below historical averages and has not cleared accumulated inventory.

Growth is distributed across transaction types

The expansion of the market is not concentrated in one structure. It is occurring across direct transactions, LP stake sales, and GP-led processes, each addressing a different source of liquidity demand.

Direct secondaries remain the largest component, driven primarily by employee and early investor sales in late-stage companies. These transactions tend to cluster around companies with recent primary rounds, where price discovery is clearer, and bid-ask spreads are narrower.

At the same time, LP-led secondaries are increasing as institutional investors rebalance portfolios. In 2025, LP-led venture secondaries represented a growing share of activity, reaching roughly 22% of LP-led secondary volume, up from low double-digit levels in prior years.

GP-led secondaries are also scaling, particularly through continuation vehicles. These structures allow sponsors to extend holding periods while providing liquidity to existing LPs. In broader private markets, GP-led transactions now represent a meaningful share of exit activity, accounting for ~16% of sponsor exits in 2025.

At the global level, the same pattern is more pronounced. Secondary transaction volume across private markets exceeded $200 billion in 2025, with expectations of continued growth toward $300 billion over the next few years.

The implication is that secondaries are not scaling through a single dominant format. They are scaling as a set of complementary mechanisms, each tied to a different source of supply.

The convergence with IPOs and M&A

The growth of secondaries is directly linked to constraints in traditional exit markets.

IPO activity has recovered modestly but remains below historical norms in both volume and consistency. In 2025, only a few dozen VC-backed companies went public, raising less capital than required to normalize liquidity across the venture ecosystem.

M&A activity has improved but is still insufficient relative to the backlog of venture-backed companies. At the same time, distributions to LPs remain below long-term averages, which increases pressure on funds to generate liquidity through alternative channels.

This combination, limited exits, extended holding periods, and low distributions, creates persistent demand for secondary transactions.

Secondaries address that demand in a way that is not tied to full company exits. They allow partial liquidity at the asset level (direct secondaries) or at the fund level (LP sales and continuation vehicles).

Importantly, this function is consistent across cycles. In periods of strong markets, secondaries provide access to oversubscribed assets. In constrained markets, they provide liquidity when exits are unavailable. The underlying mechanism does not change, only the use case.

Market size is large, but depth remains concentrated

Secondary activity is concentrated in a relatively small number of companies. Large, late-stage names with recent funding rounds dominate transaction volume because they offer both liquidity and pricing visibility. Smaller or less frequently financed companies remain difficult to trade.

This concentration is visible in multiple datasets. Even at the current scale, the secondary market represents only a small share of the total private market value. For example, in mid-2025, direct secondaries represented approximately 1.9% of total unicorn value.

The gap between market size and market depth is important. It means that secondaries have achieved scale in aggregate volume, but liquidity is not evenly distributed.

There are early signs of expansion. The number of companies with secondary activity is increasing, and pricing dispersion has narrowed as more transactions establish reference points. Median transaction sizes have also increased significantly, with some estimates showing growth from under $10 million to over $60 million in a short period.

However, the market remains dependent on a relatively narrow set of high-quality assets for the majority of its volume.

Demand is expanding, but capital formation lags

On the demand side, participation is increasing across multiple investor types.

Dedicated secondary funds are raising larger vehicles, institutional investors are allocating more capital to secondaries, and new entrants—including crossover funds and private wealth vehicles—are entering the market.

At the same time, transaction volume has grown faster than capital formation. Even as global secondary markets exceed $200 billion in annual volume, the available capital base remains relatively concentrated.

This imbalance has several implications. High-quality assets clear efficiently and often at tight discounts or premiums, particularly when recent primary pricing exists. Lower-quality or less visible assets face limited buyer interest and wider discounts.

The result is a bifurcated market where capital is sufficient for top-tier opportunities but constrained elsewhere.

Future thoughts

Secondaries have reached a scale where they function as a parallel liquidity market to traditional exits. The main factors are:

• Extended holding periods in venture-backed companies

• Persistent mismatch between liquidity demand and exit capacity

• Increasing institutionalization of capital and transaction structures

At the same time, the market remains uneven. Liquidity is concentrated, capital is not uniformly distributed, and pricing remains fragmented outside the most active assets.

The current state can be summarized as follows: secondaries have achieved scale in transaction volume, but not yet breadth in participation or consistency in liquidity.

That gap is the defining feature of the market today and the main variable that will determine how it develops from here.