Astorg Knew How to Sell. But Executing GP-Leds Is Not the Same as Running a Secondaries Fund.
The French buyout house ran two of Europe's largest single-asset continuation vehicles, then tried to become a secondaries buyer — and failed. Its story is a masterclass in the distance between using
Few firms illustrate the ambiguity of the secondaries market’s current moment better than Astorg. The Paris-headquartered buyout group has, in the space of three years, executed two of Europe’s most significant single-asset continuation vehicles — and then launched, and abandoned, an effort to sit on the other side of those same transactions. The story is instructive: being a sophisticated seller of secondaries assets does not translate, by itself, into the credibility or LP trust required to raise a secondaries fund.
Two Continuation Funds, Powerfully Executed
Astorg’s entry into the GP-led secondaries market came from necessity as much as strategy. By 2022, IQ-EQ — a global investor services platform it had backed since 2016 — had become the last remaining asset in its fifth flagship fund, Astorg V. Rather than sell into a tepid exit market or extend the fund beyond its natural life, Astorg structured a €1.3bn continuation vehicle, bringing in AlpInvest Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management Vintage Funds as lead anchor investors. The vehicle closed heavily oversubscribed, with commitments from both existing Fund V LPs rolling their positions and new investors entering alongside a meaningful equity contribution from IQ-EQ management.
Two years later, Astorg returned to the continuation vehicle structure for Normec, a pan-European testing, inspection, certification and compliance (TICC) platform that had more than quadrupled in size since its 2020 acquisition, executing over 40 bolt-on deals. The €1.4bn Normec continuation fund — backed by CVC Secondary Partners, Pantheon, Lexington Partners and Eurazeo — was again oversubscribed, with sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and family offices participating alongside rolling Fund VII LPs. The investment thesis was explicit: extend the hold to pursue a US expansion plan that would roughly double the addressable market. By August 2025, Normec had entered the US through three acquisitions.
“Following the €1.3bn continuation fund raised to support IQ-EQ in 2022, establishing our second continuation fund for Normec marks a significant milestone for Astorg.”
François de Mitry, CIO, Astorg, July 2024
Both continuation vehicles demonstrated clear GP-led deal craft: high-quality assets with proven compounders, credible value-creation extensions, well-anchored by institutional secondaries investors and structured with meaningful GP and management co-investment. On paper, Astorg had built two pieces of exemplary GP-led dealmaking.
The Pivot to Buyer — and Its Unravelling
It was against this backdrop that Astorg, in late 2023, disclosed plans to launch GP Equity Solutions: a dedicated continuation fund strategy that would position the firm as a buyer of GP-led transactions, rather than solely a seller. The product was co-led by Sebastiaan Van Den Berg and Michal Lange, with a thesis focused on investing in high-quality global B2B companies held in continuation structures — precisely the type of assets Astorg knew intimately from its own deal history.
The logic was coherent in theory: who better to underwrite GP-led transactions than a firm that had just run two of them? But the market and LP community answered that question differently. By December 2024, Astorg had paused the blind pool fundraise for GP Equity Solutions, pivoting to focus on deploying capital already secured rather than raising more. Two months later, in February 2025, the firm disbanded the GP-led effort entirely. According to the Financial Times, which first reported the broader picture of Astorg’s strategic difficulties, the firm had been unable to raise sufficient capital for the effort and had to let go of the team it had hired to run it — a striking outcome in one of the secondaries market’s most favourable fundraising environments in years.
What the IQ-EQ Sale Now Hangs Over
The irony is that Astorg’s secondaries difficulties now shadow its primary business in a more consequential way. IQ-EQ — the asset at the centre of its first and most celebrated continuation vehicle — remains unsold as of mid-2026. The Financial Times reported that Astorg had been hoping to exit IQ-EQ last year at up to €9bn; that target proved unreachable. As of January 2026, Astorg had formally kicked off a sale process with lenders preparing roughly €2bn in leveraged loan financing for prospective buyers. Blackstone, Permira, Carlyle, EQT and TPG had all circled the asset at various stages. The current valuation expectation has settled around the €5bn mark — a meaningful reset from earlier ambitions.
This matters directly for Astorg’s LP relationships. The FT reported that the firm has been unable to reach first close on its ninth flagship fund — targeting at least €4bn — since launching it in November 2025, with few existing investors willing to re-up. According to the same reporting, the 2019 and 2016 flagship funds were valued at 1.5x and 1.7x net MOIC respectively as of late 2024 — below the 2x threshold the buyout market typically considers strong. The FT also reported that Astorg had appointed Goldman Sachs to explore a sale of the firm itself, though no transaction materialised; newer partners subsequently bought equity from co-founders Thierry Timsit and Xavier Moreno in a restructuring designed to preserve the firm’s independence.
“Fundraising for our latest flagship, launched in November 2025, is progressing in what remains a selective and competitive market environment.”
Astorg — Statement to the Financial Times, May 2026
The Structural Lesson for Secondaries
Astorg’s arc offers a precise illustration of a recurring tension in the GP-led market: the skills required to be a compelling seller of continuation assets — deal structuring, asset selection, LP alignment, GP-co-investment credibility — do not automatically transfer to the buy side of that market. Secondaries LPs are asked to make a fundamentally different underwriting decision than buyout LPs. They are not backing a GP’s forward deal pipeline; they are backing that GP’s judgment about the residual value of existing assets, often at a premium to NAV. The question “do I trust this GP to pick assets worth continuing to hold?” is distinct from, and in some ways harder to answer than, “do I trust this GP to do new deals?”
Astorg’s GP Equity Solutions faced the additional burden of being a new entrant in a secondaries market already crowded with multi-decadespecialists — Lexington Partners, Pantheon, AlpInvest, Ardian, HarbourVest — who have built allocation relationships, dedicated teams, and LP bases entirely separate from their PE primary businesses. For LPs evaluating a new secondaries fund manager, the presence of a large, established buyout operation on the same platform can raise as many questions as it answers: alignment of interest, capital allocation priority, team retention incentives, and whether the secondaries unit would receive preferential access to Astorg’s own continuation vehicles — a structural conflict that is difficult to resolve cleanly.
The Normec and IQ-EQ continuation funds, in contrast, were unambiguous successes as deal structures: high-quality assets, credible continuation theses, oversubscribed closes backed by the strongest names in secondaries. If IQ-EQ clears at or near €5bn in its current process, the continuation fund LPs will have done well. Normec’s US expansion is live and accelerating. The GP-led track record, taken on its own terms, is strong.
What Astorg discovered is that executing good GP-led deals and running a credible GP-led secondaries fund are related but distinct businesses. The market — specifically the LP community that funds secondaries strategies — draws a hard line between the two.
SOURCES
Reporting draws on Astorg company announcements; Secondaries Investor (Secondaries Investor / PEI Media); Bloomberg News; Reuters; Private Equity Wire; ION Analytics / Mergermarket; and reporting by the Financial Times (”Astorg’s flagship fundraise struggles as private equity braces for shakeout,” May 2026, by Alexandra Heal), which first reported the firm’s flagship fundraising difficulties, the GP Equity Solutions team departure, fund-level MOIC figures, the Goldman Sachs mandate, and the ownership restructuring. MOIC figures and the IQ-EQ exit price aspiration cited in this article are sourced solely from FT reporting and have not been independently verified by Secondary Scoop.
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