The mandate is unchanged in its essentials: global, mid-market, buyout-focused, blended across LP-led and GP-led transactions, and diversified by vintage, GP and geography. The pitch is access to “hard-to-access GPs” through relationships built on Pantheon’s primary and co-investment business.

“The depth of our GP relationships and access to extensive data across private equity funds and companies amassed over decades enables us to have conviction and be disciplined about the assets we buy and the partners we back, particularly in the mid-market where access and selection matters most. We enter this next phase with strong conviction in our ability to keep identifying compelling opportunities for our investors.”

-Amyn Hassanally, Partner and Global Head of Private Equity Secondaries, Pantheon

Taken alone, the close is a strong fundraise. Taken with everything Pantheon has shipped since November 2023, it reads as the moment the platform’s center of gravity visibly moved to secondaries.

How the machine was built

Pantheon is a multi-strategy house, not a secondaries specialist. It still runs primaries and co-investments. But in the past three years, each asset-class team has raised a record secondaries program, and the firm has wrapped those programs in structures aimed at buyers it did not previously reach.

_{Sources: Pantheon press releases; Secondaries Investor (PGSF VI, PGSF VII target); IREI and Crain Currency (PGIF IV target). *See disclosures. n/d = not disclosed in sources reviewed.}

The full secondaries strategy

Private equity secondaries: the original engine

The oldest franchise, goes back to 1988. The edge Pantheon sells is information: decades of primary commitments give it data on funds and companies before they trade. During the PGSF VII raise, Secondaries Investor reported the fund would mainly buy into funds run by North American and European managers where Pantheon already held primary commitments, targeting a 15% to 18% net IRR and a 1.5x to 1.7x net multiple. Terms for PGSF VIII have not been made public. The franchise managed $13.5bn as of May 2026, before today’s final close.

Infrastructure secondaries: the first-mover claim

Pantheon raised its first fund including infrastructure secondaries in 2010 and had invested roughly $7.6bn in the segment by early 2024. PGIF IV was 75% deployed at final close, with more than 90% of capital committed to LP portfolio and GP-initiated deals. On the GP-led side, Secondaries Investor reported on October 2 that Pantheon backed Meridiam’s $4bn-plus infrastructure continuation vehicle alongside Ares and GIC.

“As true infrastructure investors—not generalists—we’re scaling with precision…”

Andrea Echberg, global head of infrastructure, Pantheon (April 2026)

Private credit secondaries: the fastest-scaling line

A dedicated strategy since 2018. The third generation of senior (PSD III) and opportunistic (PCO III) programs reached $8.3bn in aggregate; PCO III alone was nearly 4x its $590m predecessor. Pantheon has positioned the strategy for insurers on capital efficiency. It also shows up repeatedly on the buy side of the GP-recycling credit deals we have tracked, including Goldman Sachs’ €1.4bn credit vehicle backed by Pantheon and Temasek.

“Private credit secondaries are entering a new phase of maturity and growth…”

Rakesh (Rick) Jain, global head of private credit, Pantheon (July 2025)

Structured access: the CFO

The May 2026 CFO, arranged with Evercore, packaged exposure to the flagship PE secondaries and co-investment strategies plus a seeded portfolio into a rated structure, closing at $1bn against a $750m target with insurers among the buyers. Bloomberg placed it alongside similar structures from Neuberger Berman, Vista, Dawson and Carlyle AlpInvest. For Pantheon it opened a capital-efficient route into its secondaries strategy for balance-sheet investors.

Wealth access: the evergreen suite

Internationally, Pantheon now runs evergreen vehicles across all three secondaries asset classes: Pantheon Global Private Equity (PGPE), Pantheon Global Credit Secondaries (PGCS) and Pantheon Global Infrastructure Secondaries (PGIS). In the US, the AMG Pantheon funds cover private equity, credit and infrastructure. The firm sized the whole evergreen and listed platform at about $15bn in April 2026, including Pantheon International Plc and Pantheon Infrastructure Plc.

Distribution: the Gulf and Asia

The newest gear. Pantheon opened its first ADGM office in September and hired Firas Mallah from Sagard to lead Middle East capital formation, which we covered on September 30. Today’s release names new LPs from Asia and the Middle East as a distinguishing feature of PGSF VIII, without naming or sizing them. The timing suggests the office was opened with this fundraise already in motion rather than to start it.

Company profile

Where this sits in the market

A $6bn close is not mega-fund territory. CVC Secondary Partners closed SOF VI at $10bn in September, and the largest flagships run well above that. But Pantheon has deliberately positioned below the mega-funds, and its step from $3.25bn to $6bn in one vintage is steeper than CVC’s move from $5.8bn to $10bn. What sets Pantheon apart in the platform-versus-specialist debate is breadth rather than size: few managers run institutional and evergreen secondaries programs across PE, infrastructure and credit at once. The next vintage will show whether the sourcing advantage that built the machine survives the scale it has produced.

The figure carries a footnote, and the footnote is two words long: “Internal estimate.” Every other ranking on the same run of slides is sourced to Dealogic. The CV number is the exception.

Where the number sits

Jefferies did not file CV advisory under a secondaries heading. It placed the 20%+ figure inside its “Large-Cap Private Equity M&A” pillar, one of four pillars the bank says its investment banking franchise is now built on. The other stat on that slide is a #3 ranking in PE M&A over $1 billion. Jefferies is presenting CV advisory to shareholders as part of its core sponsor business, sitting alongside sell-side M&A as another exit route it can run for the same clients.

_{Source: Jefferies 2026 Investor Meeting presentation, slides 28–31 and endnotes (slides 61–62).}

A note on terms: the M&A rankings on slides 28 and 29 cover sponsor exits sold to other buyers, including secondary buyouts. They are not secondaries-market data and should not be read as part of the CV claim.

Does the math hold?

Jefferies’ own market reviews give us a denominator. Its February 2026 review put 2025 GP-led volume at $115 billion. Its July 2026 review put H1 2026 GP-led volume at $62 billion and sized CVs at 89% of GP-led volume in both periods. Applying the 20% floor to those figures gives the implied volume Jefferies would need to have advised.

_{Secondary Scoop calculation from Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review data (February and July 2026). Assumes the share is measured by volume, which the deck does not state.}

The one hard number Jefferies has published on its own activity is consistent with that. The July review states that its Secondary Advisory team advised on $30 billion of secondary volume in H1 2026, about a quarter of the $118 billion market. That figure combines LP-led and GP-led work, so it cannot isolate CVs. But it leaves ample room for $11 billion or more of CV mandates in the half.

The denominator also holds up outside Jefferies. Lazard’s 2025 report put GP-led volume at $116 billion, within a billion of Jefferies’ count. Lazard’s interim 2026 report is slightly less generous on structure, putting CVs at 84% of first-half GP-led deployment versus Jefferies’ 89%. A smaller CV pool would make a given amount of Jefferies activity look like a larger share, so that difference does not undercut the claim.

“CVs have become a mainstream exit mechanism.”

Jefferies, Global Secondary Market Review, July 2026

Why it matters to a bank’s shareholders

The more interesting question is why Jefferies chose to put the number in front of equity investors at all. The July review gives part of the answer: 82 of the top 100 sponsors by AUM have now executed a CV, and GP-led transactions accounted for 14% of sponsor-backed exit volume. For a bank whose investment banking business was, by its own description on slide 27, historically weighted toward sponsors, a CV is now a standard product to sell the same client base.

It also helps explain the shape of Jefferies’ sponsor franchise. A bank that ranks #2 in mid-market sell-side PE M&A and advises on a fifth of CVs is positioned on both exit routes a sponsor weighs for a mature asset: sell it, or roll it. Jefferies does not break out secondaries advisory revenue, so the deck offers no way to size what that is worth inside its $2.7 billion of LTM advisory revenue.

A crowded field with no scoreboard

Jefferies is not the only advisor claiming the lead. Evercore’s H1 2026 review describes its private capital advisory group as “the world’s leading secondaries advisory business,” without publishing a share or advised-volume figure of its own. Evercore also counts a slightly larger market than Jefferies: $121 billion of H1 2026 volume and $65 billion GP-led, against Jefferies’ $118 billion and $62 billion, so the same deal book converts into a different share depending on whose total is used. Behind those two sit Lazard, which agreed in April to acquire Campbell Lutyens and expects to close in 2026; PJT Park Hill; Houlihan Lokey; and dedicated GP-led teams at Morgan Stanley, UBS, Rothschild & Co and Moelis, with Raymond James, Baird and William Blair active in the mid-market. None of them publishes a CV share on a comparable basis.

That gap is built into how the market is measured. Market sizing in secondaries comes from the advisors who run the deals: Jefferies, Lazard and Evercore publish the reports the rest of the market cites, and each builds them partly from its own deal flow. That is how a fragmented private market gets measured at all. It also means a share claim like this one cannot be independently checked from public data, and readers should treat it as a well-informed self-assessment rather than a league table.

The claim does not need to be exact to be meaningful. Even at a share in the mid-teens, Jefferies would be among the two or three dominant CV advisors at a time when the advisory field is consolidating. A rival publishing a competing figure, measured on the same basis, would be the most useful next data point.

The close, briefly

The terms were set in January and confirmed at closing on August 31, so we only recap them here. EQT paid a $3.2bn base consideration, mostly in about 80.4 million EQT shares, with up to $500m of cash earn-out tied to Coller’s performance through March 2029. EQT also took 10% of the carry in Coller International Partners IX (CIP IX) and the right to invest in 35% of the carry in future closed-end Coller funds. Jeremy Coller stays on as Head and CIO of the renamed Coller EQT and joins EQT’s Executive Committee. EQT has committed to doubling Coller’s FAUM within four years.

What’s new is how the business now looks inside EQT’s accounts. Yesterday, EQT reported Secondaries as a fourth operating segment next to Private Capital, Infrastructure and Real Estate. Coller brought 323 FTEs and €34bn of fee-paying AUM into the group. Of EQT’s €10.9bn of net inflows to key funds in the quarter, €10.3bn came from adding Coller. Of the €24.4bn of net inflows to other strategies, €19.0bn did.

The restatement: same fees, smaller base

The most technical disclosure may be the one LPs and analysts ask about most. Coller EQT ended Q3 with $38bn of fee-paying AUM on its own methodology. On EQT’s methodology the figure is $33bn. From Q4, Coller EQT will report on EQT’s basis, and the year-end FAUM guidance for the segment drops from $40bn to $35bn.

The fund pipeline

CIP IX, Coller’s latest private equity secondaries flagship, now counts as one of EQT’s key funds. EQT says it is “performing on plan” and was 75–80% invested as of October 15. On the call, management put it at about $10bn of fee-generating commitments. Coller EQT is preparing to launch CIP X early next year.

On credit, Coller EQT has launched fundraising for CCO III, the third vintage of its credit secondaries series. The fund charges fees on invested capital and has not been activated yet, so it adds nothing to fee-paying AUM for now.

This matters because credit secondaries are EQT’s only route back into credit. EQT sold its credit business in 2020. Asked whether it now needs a primary lending platform, CEO Per Franzén said no.

“Given the growth opportunity that we see ahead also in the insurance segment, we don’t see a need for us to add a primary credit platform in order to be able to capture that opportunity.”, Per Franzén, CEO, EQT · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

Insurance is where Coller looks least like the rest of EQT

In Q3, Coller EQT raised $2.7bn for its funds and vehicles through structured insurance products. On the call, management said insurers account for close to 25% of Coller EQT’s client commitments, compared with less than 10% for EQT overall, and that Coller has raised almost $9bn from insurance since 2024. EQT framed the opportunity as products that mix both sides of its platform.

“This is a core growth area for Coller EQT going forward, but also for EQT as a whole, given the possibility to create combined primary and secondary insurance solutions.”, EQT management · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

A new leg: infrastructure secondaries

This is the one strategic signal from the quarter that hadn’t appeared in any earlier EQT or Coller release. Coller’s nine strategies span private equity and credit secondaries. Infrastructure secondaries were not among them. Asked by Morgan Stanley about expansion into secondaries within infrastructure, EQT said it intends to build one.

“On the infra secondaries, this is a key opportunity for us. We’re fully focused on building this leg of the business. … First of all, we need to have the right people in order to run this. And that’s priority number one.”, EQT management · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

EQT gave no timeline beyond noting it was “about 45 days in from the closing.” It will be entering a segment that has started to fill up. StepStone closed a $1.7bn infrastructure secondaries fund in August, and Hamilton Lane is in market with its third.

Distribution: two wealth deals before the close

Coller signed two European wealth partnerships in the quarter, both before it formally became part of EQT.

On July 1, it partnered with Italy’s Cherry Bank to offer its private credit secondaries strategies to the bank’s wealth clients. Boris Maeder, head of international private wealth distribution, called credit secondaries “a market segment that we believe remains under allocated for many investors.”

On August 11, it partnered with Titanbay to put Coller’s evergreen secondaries funds on Titanbay’s platform for European wealth managers. Titanbay’s TradeEngine handles subscriptions, redemptions and allocations. Titanbay co-CEO Michael Gruener: “Distributing an evergreen fund into the wealth channel is one of the hardest operational problems in private markets.”

Deal flow: venture, software and European services

Coller led or co-led three GP-led deals that became public during the period:

• Lightspeed “Project Mercury” (reported August 12). Bloomberg reported that Coller is lead buyer on a roughly $600m continuation process. The vehicle would move Lightspeed’s stakes in OpenAI, Verkada, Rippling, Reflection AI and Glean out of Select V, Opportunity II and a separately managed account, and add new primary capital for Anthropic. UBS is advising. Neither firm commented, and we have not seen a close announced.

• Carrick Capital / Saviynt (August 31). A roughly $600m single-asset continuation vehicle for the identity-security company, with Coller as lead and HSBC Asset Management as co-lead. Existing LPs could roll or sell at 11x gross (10x net) on Carrick’s original investment. Carrick committed $255m of new capital as part of Saviynt’s $700m Series B at about a $3bn valuation.

• EMK Capital / VDK (October 15, just after quarter-end). Coller EQT co-led a single-asset CV for VDK, a European technical installation services group of more than 150 businesses. Size was not disclosed. It is the first deal announced under the Coller EQT name. Partner Martin Fleischer said the deal shows “the role the secondaries market can play” in backing platforms through their next phase.

Q3 at a glance

There are some sponsors in the universe that are stuck on marks and marks that are just not going to come to pass

Ted Pick, Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley (3Q26 earnings call)

Pick tied the point to pricing discipline. Buyers, he said, are very sharp to what sits in sponsors' portfolios and to the new weighted average cost of capital regime, including country, supply-chain and AI risk. Some sponsors, he added, are holding on and hoping for better.

The positive answer names continuation funds

Pick opened with the view that at some point, the piper must be paid, meaning portfolios have to be harvested. He then listed what sponsors have done instead of selling: there's been, of course, a ton of engineering, continuation funds, the ability to put some assets in new funds.

He also gave the hold-longer case a fair hearing. Some private equity investors, he said, have decided they want to keep certain assets on their balance sheet because those businesses work at higher rates and can generate low to mid-double-digit IRRs with appropriate leverage.

He credited the leading firms with mixing exits, bringing some stuff that maybe doesn't have a higher mark, but it's ready for prime time to market alongside clear winners.

No rate rescue in the base case

The comments that matter most for pricing were about the macro backdrop. Pick called it a longer odds bet that the market gets a low-rate, low-inflation, non-recessionary environment, and said he would not bet on it. Sponsors waiting for that outcome to validate their marks are, in his framing, waiting on the less likely scenario.

He also revised his own call. Pick said he may have been mistaken a couple of years ago in expecting sponsors to lead the corporate finance cycle. Corporates are leading it instead, and sponsors have to hustle to keep up with the strategic bid.

Elsewhere on the call, he said that when higher rates reflect inflation or supply shocks rather than growth, investors become less excited about putting up illiquid risk capital.

September narrowed the window

The numbers show a quarter split in two. Management described July and August as brisk, before Middle East tensions and higher global rates slowed activity around Labor Day. Equity underwriting fell 19% year on year to $525m on lower IPOs and blocks, partially offset by follow-ons. Firm-wide investment banking revenue fell 11% from the second quarter. Wells Fargo's Mike Mayo referred to pulled IPOs in his question.

Advisory was the exception, up 30% to $887m on higher completed M&A in the Americas. That fits Pick's point that corporates, not sponsors, are setting the pace.

_{Source: Morgan Stanley 3Q26 earnings release and consolidated income statement. Percentage changes calculated by Secondary Scoop.}

Morgan Stanley took a mark of its own

Morgan Stanley Investment Management reported performance-based income and other revenue of $(106)m, against $117m a year earlier. The release attributes the swing to the reversal of accrued carried interest related primarily to certain investments in one of our private funds. On the call, management described it as related to two investments in a private fund. Neither names the fund or the assets. IM net revenue fell 12% to $1.5bn, and IM compensation fell on lower carry-related pay.

Where distributions go when they come

The wealth business shows the other end of the liquidity chain. Just over half of the record $232bn in net new assets was IPO-related. Management described how fund distributions after lockups expire, and stock received by investors such as endowments, move into Morgan Stanley advice accounts. Alternatives delivered another quarter of record sales in wealth, and Pick said parts of the firm's alternatives platform, in both product and pricing, aren't available to clients anywhere else.

When exits do happen, some of the proceeds go back into wealth channels, where semi-liquid private markets products are sold.

Most coverage has treated the departure as the end of the star-dealmaker era at the world’s largest alternative asset manager. For Secondary Scoop, one detail matters more. Blackstone’s secondaries franchise, Strategic Partners, is one of the largest in the world, and Baratta never built it, never ran it, and was never its public face.

How the firm grew that business while he ran buyouts says a lot about where Blackstone is heading.

The buyout architect

Baratta joined Blackstone in 1998, when the firm had just closed its third flagship buyout fund and ran a single private equity strategy. In 2001 he moved to London to set up the European private equity business. He became global head of private equity in 2012. Deals he worked on include Merlin Entertainments, the Legoland owner, and Hilton, where Bloomberg reports Blackstone ultimately tripled its investment.

In January 2025 he moved up to a newly created role, global head of private equity strategies, which Bloomberg says required all fund heads in that category to report to him. At the same time, tech dealmaker Martin Brand took over day-to-day management of the flagship fund. Many insiders read the promotion as a step toward his exit, Bloomberg reported.

His later record is mixed. The four most recent flagship funds that have finished investing all showed net IRRs of 12% or less at the end of June, according to Bloomberg. The latest flagship raised $21bn against initial expectations of $30bn.

“Given the strength of the leaders for each of our dedicated PE verticals today, we do not intend to replace Joe’s role.”

Steve Schwarzman and Jon Gray, internal memo to employees, as reported by Bloomberg

The business that ran on its own clock

Strategic Partners did not come out of Blackstone’s buyout culture. Stephen Can founded it in 2000 inside Credit Suisse, and Verdun Perry joined at its founding. Blackstone agreed to buy it in April 2013, the year after Baratta became global head of private equity. At the time it had $9bn in assets under management.

Tony James, then Blackstone’s president and COO, fronted that deal, not the private equity chief. “Strategic Partners complements Blackstone’s existing businesses, and we expect to be able to grow its franchise and help it enter new product areas,” James said at the time.

It then did exactly that, and largely under the same leadership. Blackstone’s own biography says Perry “chairs the investment committee for each of Strategic Partners’ funds”. Baratta’s biography describes his remit differently: “He currently oversees all of the firm’s directly-invested private equity strategies.” A fund-of-funds secondaries business that buys LP interests in other managers’ funds falls outside that definition.

So the business grew tenfold in 13 years through a path separate from the buyout chain of command. It added new lanes one at a time, each with its own head. Mark Burton runs real estate secondaries, Mark Bhupathi runs infrastructure secondaries and Joshua Blaine runs GP stakes, all under Perry.

There is one gap we could not close. Bloomberg describes Baratta’s 2025 role as covering all private equity fund heads, and Blackstone reports Strategic Partners inside its private equity segment. We found no public source confirming that Perry reported to Baratta. When Baratta was promoted, Bloomberg put the teams he would lead at around $210bn. By June 30, 2025, the full private equity segment held $389bn, according to a BXPE filing. The dates differ, but the gap between those two figures suggests his remit never covered the whole segment. That is our inference, not a confirmed fact. Perry is also absent from the list of PE leaders Bloomberg names as the post-Baratta bench.

What that tells us about where Blackstone is going

Bloomberg’s second report describes Blackstone moving away from a firm dominated by a handful of star investors toward “a sprawling institution” built on a wider bench of leaders with narrower responsibilities. Real estate has already gone to co-heads to limit key-person risk. Private equity now splits across Martin Brand (core PE and the flagship funds), Jas Khaira (Blackstone N1), Viral Patel (BXPE) and Chris James (Tactical Opportunities).

Strategic Partners has worked this way for years: one long-tenured global head, specialist lanes with their own leaders, and a franchise brand that matters more than any single dealmaker. Three signals suggest this is the direction for the whole firm.

1 · GROWTH IS COMING FROM OUTSIDE THE FLAGSHIP

Blackstone’s private equity assets rose 17% year on year in the second quarter, Bloomberg reports, but that bucket includes infrastructure, secondaries and Tactical Opportunities. The flagship buyout fund fell well short of its fundraising expectations. Secondaries has been raising funds at record scale. Blackstone does not break out how much of the 17% came from each strategy, so we cannot say how much secondaries contributed. The direction is still clear. Gray said in July 2025, referring to secondaries: “The returns have been very strong over time in this area, and that’s making it attractive to investors.”

2 · SECONDARIES FITS THE RETAIL MACHINE

Gray’s central project is turning Blackstone into a manager for individual and retirement savers. BXPE, the evergreen private equity fund launched in January 2024 and now run by Viral Patel, already has a place for Strategic Partners. Its disclosures state that “investments are generally classified as Secondaries if they are sourced by Strategic Partners or structured as passive equity co-invest positions.” The sleeve is still small, at 4% of the portfolio as of March 31, 2025, according to a third-party analysis of BXPE’s reporting. Secondaries brings diversified, already-seasoned exposure and earlier cash flows, which suits a semi-liquid vehicle that has to meet redemptions. Perry has been talking up retail access since at least 2022, when he told an IPEM audience that the arrival of retail investors was among the biggest changes in the asset class.

3 · THE INSTITUTION IS THE BRAND

Strategic Partners’ fundraising copy does not sell a dealmaker. It sells scale: roughly 2,400 transactions since 2000 and “the power of the Blackstone Strategic Partners brand,” as Perry put it when SP Infrastructure IV closed. That is the pitch Gray now needs across the firm, because retail distribution runs on brand and process rather than on individual reputation.

“With substantial scale and our multi-strategy footprint, we believe we are well-positioned to capitalize on the vast, and growing, opportunities across the secondary market.”

Verdun Perry, Global Head of Blackstone Strategic Partners, January 2023

Baratta’s real secondaries legacy may be supply

Baratta leaves a mark on secondaries through the buyout portfolio he oversaw, not through the secondaries team. Bloomberg describes an industry weighed down by a backlog of unsold assets bought at high prices when rates were low. Blackstone’s recent flagships show that in their returns. Assets held too long in funds nearing the end of their lives are exactly what the GP-led market exists to handle.

One example has already surfaced. In October 2025, A Media Operator cited industry sources saying Blackstone could consider a continuation fund with a minority investor for Clarion, which it has owned since 2017, after a sale process stalled. The same report said Clarion was likely held in the 2015-vintage BCP VII, whose life runs to the end of 2027. That remains speculation, and Blackstone has not announced any such deal. But it shows the kind of decision Martin Brand’s team will face across the vintages Baratta leaves behind: sell into a weak market, extend, or run a continuation vehicle.

If those GP-led processes happen, the obvious question is who leads the pricing. Blackstone’s own secondaries franchise is one of the few buyers big enough to anchor large deals. It is also on the same side of the table as the seller.

The equity is one leg of a partnership announced in November 2025. The other is a 10-year agreement that makes Amundi the exclusive distributor of ICG’s evergreen and certain other products in the wealth channel, outside the United States, Australia and New Zealand. ICG is in turn Amundi’s exclusive provider of those products.

Secondaries go first. “Our teams are working closely on a number of products that are appropriate to the wealth market, and we are looking forward to launching the first of these in the coming weeks: an evergreen fund giving access to our LP Secondaries investment strategy,” said Benoît Durteste, CEO and CIO of ICG. In November the two firms said they would develop two European evergreen funds during the first half of 2026, one for private equity secondaries and one for private debt.

ICG runs secondaries through two teams. Strategic Equity is dedicated to the GP-led market, with a focus on single-asset continuation vehicles, and has more than 20 investment professionals in New York and London under global head Ricardo Lombardi. It has committed $24 billion across 44 GP-led transactions since 2014 and closed its fifth fund at $11 billion in March 2025, more than double the $5.3 billion predecessor and well above its $6 billion target. LP Secondaries buys buyout fund stakes from LPs and is led by Oliver Gardey in London and Ryan Levitt in New York. Its debut fund closed in April 2024 at its $1 billion hard cap, or $1.6 billion including co-investment vehicles and separately managed accounts.

ICG has been making the wealth case for secondaries for some time. In a December 2024 piece, Levitt and Gardey argued that secondaries give wealth investors more cash-efficient access to private equity, exposure to mature assets closer to liquidity, and a faster route to returning capital. Amundi, which serves more than 600 distributors and over 200 million investors and manages close to €2.6 trillion, is the channel where that case now gets tested.

Sources: Amundi and ICG, "Amundi and ICG complete equity partnership" (17 September 2026); ICG, "ICG and Amundi announce long-term strategic and equity partnership" (18 November 2025); ICG, Private Equity Secondaries capability page; ICG, Strategic Equity strategy page; ICG, "ICG Strategic Equity Completes Record Fundraise of $11bn" (3 March 2025); ICG, "ICG announces $1bn final close for debut LP Secondaries fund" (2 April 2024); ICG, "Could secondaries offer an optimal route into private equity for wealth investors?" (10 December 2024).

The premise of the session was refreshingly unglamorous: three liquidity tools: GP-led continuation vehicles, GP stakes, and NAV-based structures such as strip sales, have all migrated from niche to normal in a short span of years, and the panel’s job was to be candid about who actually bears the cost of that normalization. The framing point, made early, was structural: none of these tools create new equity. They transfer risk between a seller who wants liquidity and certainty, and a buyer who absorbs that risk in exchange for a claim on future upside, a distinction the discussion returned to repeatedly when weighing whether a given structure serves the LP, the GP, or mostly the intermediaries designing it.

Continuation vehicles: no longer the exception, still not standardized

Before getting to what’s wrong with how CVs are run, the panel was clear about why they exist at all. The core rationale, as laid out in the room, is a mismatch between an asset’s ideal hold period and a fund’s fixed lifespan: a genuinely strong, “trophy” asset can still be compounding value well past the point a traditional fund structure requires it to be sold. A continuation vehicle is what lets stakeholders: the GP, the existing LP base, and the incoming CV investor, separate the fund’s contractual duration from the asset’s own optimal duration, and it’s that shared understanding of the benefit of a longer hold for the right asset that the panel described as the real justification for the structure, not simply a liquidity release valve.

Part of the discussion made the case that continuation vehicles have become a genuine portfolio-construction tool rather than a purely defensive one, underwritten by some investors as incoming capital with the same rigor applied to primary due diligence, treating each CV as an investment decision in its own right rather than a binary roll-or-cash-out choice forced on them by a GP.

That said, the process complaints raised were pointed and specific. Investors are typically given roughly 20 business days to decide whether to roll or liquidate, a window widely regarded as too short given the complexity of the decision, with valuation information that isn’t always transparent, evidenced, or delivered with enough lead time to properly assess. Some processes were described as “really controversial,” alongside others that were well run, with the broader point being that the industry still lacks a complete standard for how a GP should run a CV process, even as informal guidance (through bodies like ILPA) has started to fill the gap.

Transparency and education were treated as two sides of the same problem. On transparency, the ask was specifically about valuation: LPs need pricing information that is evidenced and delivered early enough to actually underwrite a roll decision, not simply presented as a fait accompli alongside the fairness opinion. On education, the panel’s read was more optimistic, LPs, in aggregate, are becoming noticeably more sophisticated about these structures than they were even a few years ago, increasingly organizing collectively (through LPACs, for instance) to push back on unfavorable terms, and working alongside guidance bodies to make the overall process more LP-friendly. Neither transparency nor education was described as solved; both were described as visibly improving.

“The 20 days is not the right deadline for... continuation vehicles. It needs to be negotiated, [it needs] equal footing, and maybe the market should move.”

GP stakes: a liquidity tool for the manager, not the LP

The panel then turned to GP stakes, minority investments in the management companies behind private funds, discussed as a liquidity tool worth including alongside continuation vehicles even though it operates at a different level of the structure entirely. The consensus was that LPs generally don’t object to GPs bringing in a new capital partner at the management-company level. The concern raised was about incentives: a new stakeholder brings its own priorities, which may or may not align with what existing LPs want from the GP, pushing, for example, toward aggressive AUM growth rather than continued stewardship of existing assets, or redirecting a GP’s attention toward a new strategic partner’s agenda. The ask was for guardrails ensuring GP-stakes transactions don’t disadvantage either the existing LP base or the incoming stakeholder, rather than opposition to the structure itself.

NAV structures, strip sales, and the next frontier

Strip sales and other NAV-based structures got the least airtime of the three tools, discussed mainly as an extension of the same risk-transfer logic, a seller carving off a slice of a portfolio’s future cash flows for upfront liquidity while a buyer takes on the associated risk, structurally adjacent to the preferred-equity solutions other summit panels covered in more depth. The closing remarks pointed to collateralized fund obligations (CFOs) as the genuine “next frontier”, a securitization-based liquidity tool expected to become increasingly relevant, particularly for the European market, with a caution that it can be an efficient capital tool without yet being widely understood by the investors buying into it.

The opening session made the case for the secondaries market’s size. This one made the case for why size, on its own, no longer tells you very much. Rather than a lineup of buyers arguing over the same territory, the panel represented a market that has genuinely split into distinct bands, some players built for scale, others built to stay small enough that the biggest generalists never bother competing with them.

A market that has split into bands, not tiers

Across the conversation, ticket sizes discussed ranged from as small as $3–5 million on the LP-led side up to $300 million or more for larger middle-market transactions, with GP-led activity clustering in the $10–100 million range and one strategy built specifically around $30–40 million North American deals. What emerged wasn’t a single market with a few large players at the top, it was several adjacent markets, each defined by a ticket-size band narrow enough that a buyer built for one band rarely has a natural reason to compete in another.

One recurring theme was deliberate positioning below the radar of the largest generalist funds: a segment of the market was explicitly described as tickets that “don’t move the needle” for the biggest players, which several panelists treated as a structural advantage rather than a limitation, being too small to attract mega-fund competition keeps pricing more rational. At the other end, a dedicated niche strategy was described as going wherever asset type, geography, or structure put a deal outside what the other approaches on the panel were built to do.

A market with room, and a market with pressure

The panel’s read on the broader environment was double-edged. Zooming out, one framing stuck: the private equity universe of the 1980s ran everything, infrastructure, venture, buyout, out of the same fund, and specialization has been a decades-long unbundling process ever since. Secondaries, on that view, still has a long runway left to specialize further, and competition along the way was described as healthy rather than threatening.

The near-term dynamics were more mixed. Large generalist players are putting real pressure on pricing at the top of the market, which the panel framed as good news for buyers generally: there’s room for more complex, harder-to-execute transactions further down the ticket-size spectrum, but less good news for sellers on both the GP-led and LP-led sides, who are facing tighter pricing precisely where the generalists compete hardest. One concern raised repeatedly cut across every strategy represented: human capital. Finding and training the specialized underwriting talent this fragmenting market needs was flagged as a genuine constraint on the industry’s ability to keep growing into its own specialization thesis.

“We are as responsible as the GP for making it a success.”

How to differentiate when everyone claims an edge

Asked directly how to stand out, the panel converged on two headline answers: transparency and reputation, backed by a more granular checklist. On transparency, the point was made that a buyer’s obligation to a portfolio company’s success extends well past closing, framed as being equal to the GP’s own obligation, not a passive financial position taken and then left alone. That posture, the panel argued, is what actually wins repeat deal flow and reputational trust in a market where GPs are choosing a long-term capital partner, not just a price.

Where specialization goes next

On the forward-looking question, the panel’s list ran longer than a single trend. First and most fundamental: investors are moving away from treating secondaries as a one-size-fits-all allocation, splitting it instead into genuinely distinct sub-strategies. Second, private credit secondaries were flagged as the next asset class likely to develop its own dedicated specialists, following the same maturation path infrastructure secondaries has already been through. Third, geography: the Middle East and Asia were named as PE ecosystems still building out the secondary-market infrastructure that North America and Western Europe already have. Fourth, AI-native secondary players were raised again as an entrant category the incumbents expect to eventually contend with. Fifth, sector specialization more broadly, buyers building focused expertise in specific industries rather than staying generalist across the private equity universe.

The more provocative open question was whether secondaries themselves are becoming a source of alpha, rather than simply a liquidity or portfolio-management tool. One data point offered in that discussion: an estimate that roughly 2.5% of assets bought by secondaries funds from the 2016 vintage have still not been returned to investors, cited as a reason to think carefully about how “specialized” underwriting needs to get as hold periods stretch.

The headline number for the half: roughly $120 billion of secondaries volume, up 19% year-over-year and the strongest first half the market has recorded.

A resilient market that hides its own concentration

The more interesting part of the session wasn’t the growth story, it was the case for treating that growth story with some suspicion. The speaker pointed to the resiliency of public markets as a genuine tailwind: the S&P 500 up roughly 12% year-to-date, the MSCI World up 12–13%. But underneath that resilience sits a concentration problem that anyone marking a private portfolio against public comparables needs to reckon with. A single name, Nvidia, was cited as contributing more than 20% of the index’s return, which means that the benchmarks investors compare their portfolios against “may not, or probably not,” reflect the specific businesses they actually hold.

“Whatever the world’s thrown at this industry... the market still grew. So we think we’re in the right place, in a sense.”

That granularity point extended to rates and financing. The environment was described as comparatively stable in the US, with more open debate in Europe over the path of rates, and by extension, over financing costs and leverage assumptions baked into secondaries pricing. Discounts persist in this market not simply because of a single macro variable but because there is, as there almost always is, some source of real uncertainty for buyers to price in.

Exits: better on paper, narrower in practice

On the exit environment, arguably the single biggest swing factor for DPI-starved LPs, the message was cautiously constructive but heavily qualified. A year ago, the industry expected to be working through a backlog of unexited companies as both M&A and capital markets activity picked back up. That has happened only partially. Citing Goldman Sachs research, the speaker noted exit values are up close to 48% versus the first half of last year, but that growth is “highly concentrated in very large deals,” meaning the improvement is real for sponsors with exposure to headline-scale exits and far less visible for everyone else.

The broader point tied back to the industry’s chronic distribution problem. Sponsors want DPI; LPs want distributions; and a market that’s technically delivering more exit value doesn’t help much if that value is locked inside a small number of transactions. As the speaker put it, the lesson of the last year has been to keep challenging your own assumptions on exit timing, because the market keeps producing surprises, and not always the kind that show up in the aggregate statistics.

Regarding 2027, expectation is still challenging, distribution will be hard. Which makes the point for a real need to communicate and educate investors on what is being done in this market.

The role of AI in all this? A tool for fair value. Owners of assets will know better the value of their assets, which is great for the transparency we need and that was mentioned along the summit, and we will bring it to you on the upcoming articles.

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

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

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

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

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

The headline number, and how fast it grew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlo Pirzio-Biroli, to Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

Where this sits against the broader market

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

Some Extra Thoughts

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

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

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

The scoreboard

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

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

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

The quiet secondaries flex

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

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

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

The evergreen leverage flag

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

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

Dave Layton, CEO, responding to the PGPE leverage question

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

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

The redemption tell: 10% above marks

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

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

Roberto Cagnati, incoming co-CEO

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

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

A $75 billion exit backlog

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

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

The changing of the guard

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

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

What we’re watching next

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

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

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

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

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

The news: infrastructure secondaries closes at $1.7bn

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

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

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

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

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

1. PRIVATE EQUITY SECONDARIES: THE FOUNDING STRATEGY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. INFRASTRUCTURE SECONDARIES: THE NEW ARRIVAL

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

The pattern across all five

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

Why the sequencing matters more than any single close

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

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

Our Secondary Scoop take

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

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

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

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

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

At least six funds the last year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t Lightspeed’s first continuation vehicle

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

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

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

What’s different about Project Mercury

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

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

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

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

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

Lightspeed isn’t the only one doing this

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

• NEA has been quietly developing its own continuation vehicle.

• RockPort Capital moved two portfolio companies into a CV.

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

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

The open question

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

Except for one line. On the investment performance summary that opens Ares’ own earnings deck, private equity secondaries showed a gross return of −5.3% for the quarter and −1.7% over the trailing twelve months, the only strategy on the entire page, across credit, real assets, secondaries and private equity, to post a negative LTM number.

That is an odd thing to see attached to a firm that spent the rest of the call talking about secondaries momentum. It is also, per Ares’ own explanation on the call, largely an artifact of how the number is built, not a read on how the business is actually performing today.

The number investors see first

Ares discloses secondaries performance two ways in its quarterly materials. The first is a single-line composite on the “Investment Performance Highlights” slide, the kind of summary an analyst skims in the first thirty seconds of opening the deck. For Q2-26, that slide showed:

Buried further into the deck, in an endnote on slide 42, not the summary table, Ares clarifies that the private equity secondaries line is a composite of two funds: Landmark Equity Partners XVI and Landmark Equity Partners XVII. On a net basis, that composite returned −3.7% for the quarter and −1.3% over the trailing year. Better than the gross figure, but still negative.

It took a direct analyst question to get the real explanation.

What Arougheti actually said

On the call, an analyst asked CEO Michael Arougheti directly why private equity secondaries returns were negative for the quarter when APMF, Ares’ publicly disclosed perpetual secondaries vehicle, was performing well and secondary market activity was described as robust.

“Fund 17, which was the first fund that we deployed under Ares, the performance there is pretty strong. Since inception, returns about 26% gross and net with about 17. Fund 16, which was the last fund, which is a much older vintage but a much larger fund, can have an outsized impact on the composite as we report. That’s basically what’s happening there. That older vintage fund, just given its size, moved down. But if you look at all the active in the ground funds, Fund 17, APMF, we’re actually continuing to see strong, strong returns.”

Michael Arougheti, CEO, Ares Management — Q2 2026 earnings call, July 31, 2026

Translated into fund names using Ares’ own glossary: “Fund 16” is Landmark Equity Partners XVI (LEP XVI), a 2016-vintage fund with $3.97 billion in AUM that Ares still discloses in its standard performance tables. “Fund 17” is Landmark Equity Partners XVII (LEP XVII), the fund Arougheti describes as the first one Ares deployed following its 2021 acquisition of Landmark Partners, and the one he credits with the ~26% gross / ~17% net IRR since inception.

WHY THE NUMBERS DIVERGE

A composite return blends the results of every fund in a strategy, typically weighted by size. When a large, older fund is winding down its remaining marks while a smaller, newer fund is compounding early gains, the composite can go negative even while every dollar of fresh capital is being invested into a strategy performing well.

Arougheti’s own framing on the call reinforces the point: LP-led secondary purchases tend to show a return bump on entry as the buyer captures a NAV discount, while GP-led transactions “tend to see more consistency but less volatility.” A composite that mixes a legacy LP-led fund nearing the end of its life with a newer fund built more around GP-led activity will not move in a straight line, and reading the blended number without the components can lead an LP to draw exactly the wrong conclusion about current underwriting quality.

What’s actually disclosed, and what isn’t

Here is where it’s worth being precise about what LPs can verify versus what they have to take on faith. Ares’ supplemental fund performance table (slide 32 of the earnings deck) discloses hard numbers for LEP XV and LEP XVI, plus APMF. LEP XVII, “Fund 17,” the fund driving Arougheti’s bullish framing, does not appear in that table at all. Its 26% gross / ~17% net IRR exists only as a verbal figure from the call, not as a line item in Ares’ standardized disclosure.

That’s not necessarily a red flag, Ares only reports individual fund lines for what it calls “significant funds,” those contributing at least 1% of total management fees or FPAUM for two consecutive quarters, and a fund as new as LEP XVII may simply not have crossed that threshold yet. But it does mean the single strongest data point in Ares’ explanation for a negative composite is, for now, unverified against the company’s own standardized reporting. LPs relying on Ares’ disclosure documents alone would see the drag from Fund 16 and the strength of APMF — not the Fund 17 number that, on the call, did the most work to reframe the story.

The broader point Arougheti made

Worthington’s follow-up question was more structural: are secondaries returns lagging primary private equity by more than usual this cycle? Arougheti’s answer is worth reading in full, because it captures something Secondary Scoop has argued from the other direction for a while — that secondaries performance needs to be read on its own terms, not benchmarked against primary buyout returns.

“I think if you were to look at the historical return data, the secondaries returns will generally be lower, but they also tend to be range bound. If you were to look at PE secondary returns, first quartile to fourth quartile, the dispersion of returns is much tighter than you see in the primary market... You’re going to get a generally lower return, but a much lower volatility of return versus the primary market.”

Michael Arougheti, CEO, Ares Management — Q2 2026 earnings call, July 31, 2026

He also flagged that this dynamic may shift as the market structurally moves toward GP-led transactions and continuation vehicles, which behave differently from legacy LP-led portfolio purchases. That’s a claim worth watching rather than accepting outright — Ares has an obvious incentive to frame secondaries as a durable, lower-volatility allocation given how central the strategy now is to its wealth channel distribution (APMF alone drove the bulk of the segment’s 141% year-over-year growth in fee-related performance revenue this quarter). But directionally, it lines up with what the broader secondaries market has been signaling: GP-led volume has been the primary growth engine industry-wide, and the return profile of a continuation vehicle is mechanically different from a blind-pool LP stake purchased a decade ago.

The segment, in context

Strip out the composite noise and the underlying Secondaries Group numbers for the quarter were straightforwardly strong: AUM up 30% year-over-year to $44.2 billion, fee-paying AUM up 28% to $31.5 billion, fee related earnings up 21% to $60.9 million, and realized income up 23% to $59.7 million. The segment deployed $1.9 billion in the quarter — split roughly $0.8 billion in PE secondaries, $0.4 billion in real estate secondaries and $0.4 billion in credit secondaries — and this quarter’s deck breaks out credit secondaries as its own AUM line for the first time we’ve seen from Ares, at $5.0 billion, alongside PE secondaries ($24.2B), real estate secondaries ($7.8B) and infrastructure secondaries ($7.2B).

On the real estate side, Arougheti flagged "good momentum" in what he called Ares' "global structured solution strategy," which raised over $500 million in the quarter, and the firm expects an initial close on its next dedicated real estate secondaries fund in the second half of 2026, with fundraising described as running ahead of the pace of the prior vintage at the same point. Neither of those items came up as a Q&A topic, but they round out a picture of a platform expanding across every secondaries sub-strategy — PE, real estate, infrastructure and now credit — even in the same quarter its headline PE return went negative.

It’s the number we’d been waiting for. In May, writing about Lexington quietly powering Franklin’s best year ever, we noted that management wouldn’t attach a figure to the flagship, deferring that to a regulatory filing expected later in the fiscal year. Today’s call didn’t produce that filing, but it produced the next best thing, plus a second, less-publicized detail: Lexington’s contribution to the quarter’s fundraising was split across four distinct strategies, including, for the first time on an earnings call, an explicitly named continuation vehicle line.

The number everyone was waiting for

Some context on why “$10 billion by September” matters, and why it should be read carefully. Lexington’s prior flagship, Lexington Capital Partners X, closed in 2024 at $22.7 billion, one of the largest secondaries funds ever raised. In May, when Johnson was asked whether there was any reason the next flagship couldn’t match or exceed that figure, she didn’t hesitate to say no. That framed expectations for a fund in the same size class.

What Johnson disclosed this quarter is narrower than that: a running total, not a final close. “By September, they should exceed $10 billion” describes where the fund stands today, mid-fundraise, not what it will ultimately raise. Fund X took multiple years and several closes to reach its final size. A fair reading of that comment is that Lexington XI is tracking toward, not confirmed at, the scale of its predecessor. The real test comes when Franklin files the regulatory disclosure that will show the fund’s actual committed capital, which management has previously said would land later this fiscal year.

Four strategies, one line item

The more granular disclosure came a beat later in the same answer. Of the $10.3 billion Franklin raised in private markets this quarter, Lexington contributed roughly 40%, call it $4.1 billion, and Johnson was specific about where it came from.

“That 40% is in four strategies. Their flagship fund, their middle market fund, their continuation vehicle, and the perpetual all raised and contributed to that.”

Jenny Johnson, CEO, Franklin Templeton, Q3 FY2026 earnings call

Franklin has talked about Lexington’s flagship and its evergreen (”perpetual”) vehicle before. What’s new is the explicit acknowledgment of a standalone continuation vehicle strategy sitting alongside them as an active fundraising line, not a one-off deal, but a recurring product contributing to quarterly numbers. Combined with the middle-market fund, that’s four separate Lexington vehicles in market simultaneously, which is a meaningfully more diversified fundraising engine than the flagship-driven narrative from May suggested.

The fundraising target keeps moving up

Zoom out from Lexington and the broader private markets story is one of continuous upward revision. Franklin entered fiscal 2026 with a target of $25–30 billion in private markets fundraising. By the Q2 call in April, management was signaling “above $30 billion.” Now, with $33.0 billion already raised fiscal year-to-date and one quarter left, the outlook has moved again, to roughly $40 billion for the full year.

That said, the quarter itself was softer in absolute terms than the one before it: $10.3 billion raised in Q3 versus $13.2 billion in Q2, a reminder that private markets fundraising is lumpy by nature and that quarter-over-quarter comparisons are less informative than the fiscal-year trend.

The evergreen bridge, still compounding

Franklin’s wealth-channel bridge into private markets, the evergreen vehicles co-managed across Lexington (secondaries), Benefit Street Partners (private credit), and Clarion Partners (real estate), reached $8.9 billion in combined AUM this quarter, up from $8 billion at the end of Q2. Franklin didn’t break out redemption activity on this call the way it did in May, when management pointed to zero redemption pressure across the suite.

The wealth channel overall now represents about 20% of Franklin’s total alternatives fundraising, in line with the 20–30% range management has said it’s targeting. This quarter alone, wealth-channel fundraising across evergreen and drawdown structures totaled $3 billion, bringing the fiscal year-to-date figure to $6.6 billion. Jenny Johnson’s framing was blunt: distributing alternatives through the wealth channel is “hand-to-hand combat”, advisor by advisor, which is precisely why Franklin’s existing distribution footprint is doing double duty as a moat.