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.