No DPI "For a While": Blackstone's Quiet Gift to Secondaries
President Jon Gray told analysts that white-collar services, professional information services, and enterprise software buyouts "won't see a ton of DPI" any time soon. A gap secondaries exist to fill.
Blackstone’s second-quarter 2026 earnings call was billed as an AI story. Steve Schwarzman opened with a megatrend speech, Jon Gray walked through infrastructure and insurance momentum, and most of the sell-side questions chased data centers and BCRED redemptions. But buried in the numbers and the Q&A was a much better story for this audience: Strategic Partners X is fundraising at a pace that should worry anyone still betting secondaries growth has a ceiling, and the firm’s own executives just handed the market a textbook explanation for why LPs need liquidity solutions right now.
SP10 is no longer just “another fund.” It’s an earnings driver.
Strategic Partners X launched its investment period in March 2026. By June 30, three months later, it had already pulled in $11.0 billion of committed capital, with $8.6 billion still uncalled. Secondaries inflows for the quarter totaled $5.7 billion, and Blackstone says the bulk of that came from SP10 alone.
For context: its predecessor, Strategic Partners IX, took from October 2021 to March 2026, the better part of five years, to reach $19.7 billion in lifetime commitments. SP10 is on pace to get there in a fraction of the time.
What matters more than the pace is how management is talking about it. On the call, CFO Michael Chae listed SP10 alongside the Corporate Private Equity Asia III fund and the firm’s energy transition vehicle as one of three specific drawdown activations underpinning Blackstone’s guidance for double-digit management fee growth in 2027. That’s a notable shift: secondaries fundraising isn’t being framed as a nice-to-have diversification line, it’s one of three named pillars of the firm’s forward fee story.
The DPI drought, admitted on the record.
During the Q&A, Blackstone essentially narrated the exact conditions that drive LP-led and GP-led secondary activity.
Asked about the sluggish M&A recovery, Jon Gray broke the portfolio into three buckets: AI-adjacent infrastructure and energy names (where “bids are strong, pricing is good”), AI-unaffected consumer businesses (still liquid, if less frothy), and “white-collar services, professional information services, enterprise software.” On that last bucket, Gray didn’t hedge: “That’s where you’ve seen less liquidity. That’s where you’re seeing a part of the private equity market where you won’t see a ton of DPI. And I think that’s going to be there for a while.”
Earlier in the same Q&A block, on realizations timing more broadly, management drew a direct historical parallel to the aftermath of the 2008-09 crisis, when “the engine didn’t really ramp back up” until 2013, implying this cycle’s distribution recovery has been running on a similarly long fuse since 2022. Net Accrued Performance Revenues did hit a four-year high in the quarter, and management pointed to IPO reopening and public NAV growth inside the corporate PE book as reasons realizations should accelerate into Q4 and 2027. But the caveat attached to nearly every answer was the same: it’s uneven, it’s sector-specific, and GPs are choosing their moment rather than forcing distributions.
That combination, a large swath of the PE book explicitly flagged as DPI-starved for “a while,” against a backdrop where the largest alternative asset manager in the world is still being cautious about timing its own exits, is precisely the setup that pushes LPs toward secondary sales and sponsors toward continuation vehicles. Blackstone wasn’t pitching secondaries on this call. It didn’t need to; it was describing the problem secondaries exist to solve.
The track record behind the pitch.
For LPs sizing up SP10 against the platform’s history, the numbers Blackstone discloses on its full Strategic Partners lineage are worth having on hand: $83.4 billion in lifetime committed capital across eleven vehicles, $82.5 billion of total investment value realized and unrealized combined, a 1.6x total MOIC, and a 14% net IRR since inception. Secondaries as a reported strategy (which Blackstone defines as Strategic Partners only, excluding GP Stakes) appreciated a modest 1.7% in the quarter and 8.1% over the trailing twelve months — well behind the 7.2%/28.6% posted by infrastructure or the 3.7%/14.4% from corporate PE, but also the steadiest, least volatile number on the page in a quarter otherwise dominated by AI-driven markups.
Worth watching separately: GP Stakes.
Blackstone continues to report its GP Stakes strategy (BXGP) apart from Strategic Partners, even though both sit under the firm’s broader “Secondaries” umbrella in its AUM disclosures. BXGP, minority stakes in the management companies of PE and other alternative managers, stood at $13.1 billion in AUM as of quarter-end. It’s a reminder that as more large managers roll GP stakes and LP/GP-led secondaries into one reporting bucket, the line between “secondaries” and “stakes in secondaries managers” is going to keep blurring in how this market gets measured.
The bottom line.
Nobody on Blackstone’s call said the word “liquidity crunch.” They didn’t have to. Between SP10’s fundraising velocity, its new status as a named driver of 2027 fee guidance, and management’s own admission that swaths of the buyout market won’t produce distributions “for a while,” the largest alternative asset manager on earth just gave the secondaries market its best unpaid advertisement of the quarter.