While thousands of private markets industry players gather in Paris for the IPEM Global 2026 edition at Palais des Congrès, a new allocation and fundraising survey of LPs and GPs was presented to the audience. It barely mentions secondaries by name, but buried in insights on co-investment, emerging managers, and the hunt for alpha are a handful of data points that read like independent confirmation of the case we have been making all year: secondaries are no longer the exception in a private markets portfolio: they’re becoming the default. The same survey also hands a specific number to a thesis Secondary Scoop has tracked since August: the software sector’s repricing has now shown up on secondaries brokers’ own trading desks.
The fund-of-funds tell
IPEM Global 2026, the report’s underlying event, draws LPs and GPs from across private equity, venture, private debt, and real assets, a much broader constituency than the secondaries specialists Secondary Scoop usually cites. That’s what makes one line in the report worth pulling out on its own. Discussing why fund-of-funds appetite is climbing “in every asset class,” the report’s authors reach for a direct comparison:
“Fund-of-funds interest is rising in every asset class. These offer access to niche parts of the market, such as emerging managers and smaller funds, two areas LPs are moving towards. Notably, secondaries showed the same broad-based climb in this report, two years before becoming a mainstream allocation.”
IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027
Read plainly, IPEM and AlixPartners are using secondaries’ own adoption curve, as measured in their own past surveys, as the reference case for what “about to go mainstream” looks like in the data. That’s a stronger endorsement of secondaries’ normalization than most secondaries-specific research can offer, precisely because the authors aren’t secondaries advisors with a platform to promote. It’s the kind of third-party validation this publication has flagged before as more persuasive than another bank’s own secondary-market review: a macro-oriented survey reaching for secondaries as its own case study of what mainstreaming looks like.
WHY THIS SURVEY, NOT A SECONDARIES REPORT
IPEM is a private markets conference organizer; AlixPartners, its “Knowledge Partner” on this report, is a global consulting firm. Neither sells secondaries advisory or fund products. The data comes from registration responses submitted by individual LP attendees and GPs representing more than 1,200 funds ahead of IPEM Global 2026 in Paris this September, supplemented by IPEM’s internal database of more than 500 market interactions. That’s a meaningfully different, and non-overlapping, sample from the bank and advisory surveys (Campbell Lutyens, Lazard, Evercore, Mizuho) this publication draws on for deal-flow and pricing data.
Secondaries’ footprint in the fundraising market keeps widening
On the supply side, the report finds that secondaries vehicles now account for 18% of private equity funds currently in market, a growing slice of the products GPs are bringing to LPs, in a year where the report’s authors describe fundraising timelines as continuing to lengthen and manager size skewing larger even as fund sizes stay resolutely mid-market. Funds of funds sit at 10% of in-market PE vehicles, while co-investment funds have eased to 25% of the total, evidence that LPs’ appetite for co-investment is increasingly being met through direct allocation and separate accounts rather than commingled co-investment vehicles.
Demand-side data points in the same direction. Emerging-manager appetite, the search for alpha that is also feeding new-relationship activity in secondaries, as the breakdown below shows, has risen sharply: 88% of LPs say they will back funds I through III in the next 12 months, up from 65% last year, and 64% are open to backing a first-time fund outright. IPEM cites a National Association of Investment Companies study finding diverse and emerging manager programs have added 700 basis points of outperformance relative to their peers, a data point worth citing directly given its source.
Who’s writing new checks in secondaries, and who isn’t
The report’s most granular secondaries data comes from a breakdown of re-up versus new-relationship commitments, tracked separately across sixteen private-markets strategies in four asset classes. Secondaries appears in all four, and the pattern differs sharply by asset class.
Figures show the share of LP commitments to secondaries strategies going to existing (”re-up”) versus new manager relationships, and the year-on-year percentage-point change in the “new” share. Source: IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027, Figure 5.
In PE, VC, and private debt, secondaries is sitting close to its asset class’s overall average split between re-ups and new relationships (roughly 49/51 in each), meaning the strategy isn’t losing its ability to bring LPs into new manager relationships even as allocators tighten their broader manager rosters. Real assets secondaries is the outlier: the swing toward re-ups is the single largest year-on-year move recorded anywhere in the report’s re-up/new breakdown, outpacing even fund-of-funds strategies in private debt and venture. LPs writing checks into real assets secondaries this year are concentrating that capital with managers they already know, even as overall infrastructure appetite stays exceptionally strong, 79% of LPs surveyed are looking at the asset class. Whether that reflects a thinner bench of established real assets secondaries managers, capacity constraints among the specialists who exist, or simply fewer new entrants with a long enough track record to court re-up-focused allocators is a question this publication plans to keep an eye on.
“LPs are concentrating re-up capital on a select few existing managers as they continue to rationalize GP relationships. New managers are being sought in segments where allocators see the potential for alpha generation, and interest in emerging managers continues to support the trend towards new commitments.”
Nicolas Beaugrand, France PE & ESG Lead, Partner & Managing Director, AlixPartners
RE-UP VS. NEW, DEFINED
A “re-up” is a commitment to a manager an LP has backed before, typically a successor fund from an existing relationship. A “new” commitment goes to a manager the LP has not previously invested with — the metric IPEM and AlixPartners use as a proxy for how much of the market’s capital is chasing fresh relationships versus consolidating around known names.
Where the appetite is actually cracking: technology
The report’s single largest sector movement has nothing to do with returns expectations or fund size — it’s a near-total reversal in LP interest in technology and software. Last year, 85% of LPs answering the sector question named it an area of interest for the coming 12 months. This year, that figure is 28%, moving technology and software from first place to last among the eight sectors IPEM tracks. And the report draws an explicit line from that shift to the secondaries market itself:
“As another indication of the lack of appetite for software, secondaries brokers are reporting buyers moving away from technology, and pricing weakening as a result.”
IPEM Allocation and Fundraising Trend Report 2027
That single sentence is an independent, non-secondaries-specialist confirmation of the thread this publication ran to its capstone in August: Campbell Lutyens’ data showing software’s share of GP-led continuation-vehicle volume collapsing from 20% to 6% year-on-year, Lazard’s buyer-survey mechanics on repricing and bid-ask widening, and Ducera’s credit-pricing evidence of software loans trading down and going distressed. IPEM and AlixPartners arrive at the same conclusion from a completely different vantage point — LP registration data and broker conversations gathered for a conference, not a secondaries deal-flow database — which is exactly the kind of corroboration that turns a sector story into a market consensus.
The nuance matters, though. GPs haven’t repriced their own view of the sector: technology and software remains GPs’ most-cited sector strength at 65%, and the leading sector focus among in-market funds at 56%, running at roughly twice LP demand, the only genuinely oversupplied sector in the entire dataset. And within technology as a capability rather than a sector label, appetite hasn’t gone anywhere: artificial intelligence remains the most sought-after technology theme among LPs, at 78% and still rising, alongside gains in deep tech and fintech. The rotation is out of software as a standalone sector bet, not out of AI-driven value creation.
“I think people are actually moving away from software, but more into software-oriented services. So, these implementer ecosystems have become very popular.”
Global asset manager, quoted in the report
Capital that’s rotating out of pure software is landing in industrials and materials (up to 73% LP interest), business services (72%), and healthcare, which at 83% now leads every sector tracked, the same rotation into “AI adoption inside conventional businesses, rather than exposure to technology as an asset class” that the report’s authors describe directly.