When people list the firms that define secondaries, the same names come up: Coller Capital, Ardian, Lexington Partners, HarbourVest. Partners Group rarely makes that list, despite having closed what was, in 1998, the largest secondary transaction ever recorded, and despite now running dedicated secondaries programs across private equity, real estate, infrastructure and private credit simultaneously. In the first half of 2026, secondaries accounted for 64% of everything the firm deployed into portfolio assets, against 36% for direct investments. That’s not a side strategy anymore. That’s more than half the business.
The deal that started it: Zug, 1998
Partners Group was founded in 1996 in Zug, Switzerland, by three former bankers: Urs Wietlisbach, Marcel Erni and Alfred Gantner; who each put in an equal share of the firm’s initial capital. The market they were entering barely had a name: as Gantner has recounted, “private equity in the way we understand it today did not exist, it was called Risikokapital, risk capital, which was associated with venture capital.” The firm’s first product, in 1997, was a $150 million small- and mid-cap fund focused on German-speaking Europe, an easier place to find an edge than the more competitive US market of the time.
The following year, Partners Group closed a $265 million transaction: a portfolio of private equity fund interests bought from Royal Dutch Shell’s US pension fund. At the time, it was the largest secondary transaction ever recorded.
There was no “GP-led” vocabulary yet, no continuation-vehicle playbook, no $121 billion first-half market of the kind Evercore now reports. Just a two-year-old Swiss shop buying illiquid fund stakes off a corporate pension plan that wanted liquidity. It’s the deal that put Partners Group on the map as a secondaries buyer, and, as the numbers below show, the firm never really stopped being one.
From one asset class to four
Most of the names that dominate secondaries headlines built their reputations primarily in one place: private equity fund interests, some later stretching into credit. Partners Group took a quieter, broader path: it built a dedicated, standalone secondaries program inside every major asset class it invests in, each with its own decades-long track record.
Private equity: active since that 1998 Shell deal, with $35 billion cumulatively deployed across 400+ transactions and every mature closed-end secondaries fund since 2008 ranked first quartile. The eighth flagship PE secondaries program closed in April 2026 with over $9 billion in total client commitments, 60% already committed at closing across a seeded portfolio, and roughly a third of new capital coming from outside Europe, led by Asia-Pacific.
Real estate: deploying secondaries capital since 2008, with $6 billion invested across 120+ transactions. The firm’s fifth real estate secondaries program launched in June 2026 targeting $1.5 billion, with a first close above $650 million; the prior vintage ranked top-quartile among 2021/2022-vintage funds per Preqin.
Infrastructure: running secondaries since 2006, one of the longest track records in that specific niche, with a fully realized net IRR of 18% since inception across 70+ transactions. The latest program closed in July 2026 at over $5.5 billion (a $1.7 billion closed-end fund plus mandates and co-investment vehicles), roughly $2 billion of which was deployed in the prior 12 months alone — including leading a continuation vehicle for a 69-aircraft commercial aviation leasing portfolio and co-leading one for a UK railway rolling-stock leasing platform.
Private credit: the newest leg, launched in April 2025 through a joint venture with Generali Investments: a Luxembourg RAIF, classified Article 8 under SFDR, dedicated to global private credit secondaries across both LP-led and GP-led transactions. Partners Group sits in as investment advisor and joint distributor, effectively doubling the combined platform’s origination capacity in a private credit market Preqin estimated at $1.6 trillion in 2025.
“We have one of the longest track records in the infrastructure secondaries market.”
Dr. Dmitriy Antropov, Head of Infrastructure Partnership Investments, Partners Group
Breadth with a filter: what gets turned down
The four-asset-class spread could easily read as a firm chasing every deal that crosses its desk. The 2024 private equity figures argue the opposite. Partners Group deployed $3.2 billion into PE secondaries that year, more than double 2023’s $1.5 billion, across 25 transactions spanning over 80 GPs, 150 underlying funds and roughly 3,000 portfolio companies, more than 80% of it into LP-portfolio deals (the largest: a €800 million NAV portfolio bought from a major UK private pension scheme, covering 12 fund interests and 250+ companies).
Against that $3.2 billion actually deployed, the firm says it reviewed $125 billion of secondaries opportunities over the same year: and declined 97% of it.
That ratio matters right now. It lands in the middle of a live debate in this market: the one about who gets to price a continuation vehicle and how fast. PitchBook’s reporting on buyout shops building in-house GP-led units (Warburg Pincus, TPG, Leonard Green and others) has framed speed-pricing “in two to three weeks as opposed to two to three quarters”, as Warburg Pincus puts it, as the new competitive edge, drawing pushback from specialists like Coller Capital’s Jon McEvoy, who has called the framing “a little bit of a spin.” Partners Group’s own numbers sit on the other side of that argument: a firm with four dedicated secondaries verticals that still says no to 97% of what it sees is making a case for selectivity over speed, worth keeping in mind the next time a two-week pricing turnaround gets pitched as the industry’s next edge.
Secondaries stopped being the side business
The clearest evidence that this is now core strategy rather than a diversification play sits in Partners Group’s own H1 2026 numbers. Of the $9 billion the firm invested in portfolio assets in the first half of the year, 64% went into secondaries and only 36% into direct investments, a split that would have been unthinkable for a firm that built its brand, and its first fund, on direct private equity in German-speaking Europe.
Total assets under management reached $186 billion as of June 30, 2026, up from $174 billion a year earlier, with H1 new client commitments of $16 billion (versus $12 billion in H1 2025) against full-year guidance of $26–32 billion. By asset class: private equity at $79.2 billion, private credit at $40.5 billion, infrastructure at $41.4 billion, real estate at $23.3 billion, and a smaller royalties strategy at $1.5 billion, the same four-plus-one structure that now runs its own secondaries program in every major bucket except royalties.
“We are pleased to report record client demand as our differentiated offering and track record continues to attract new and existing clients.”
— David Layton, CEO, Partners Group
Partners Group has told investors it expects total AUM to exceed $450 billion by 2033 (more than $200 billion of that in private equity, more than $70 billion in private credit) as it bets the broader private markets industry more than doubles over the next decade. Nothing in that target singles out secondaries specifically. But if the 64% H1 2026 split holds anywhere close to its current shape, the growth path to $450 billion runs disproportionately through the four secondaries programs, not around them.
Why we don’t talk about them enough
Partly, it’s a branding choice. Coller Capital, Ardian and Lexington built firm-level identities around the word “secondaries”; it’s the headline of what they do. Partners Group never has: secondaries at Partners Group is a capability embedded inside private equity, inside real estate, inside infrastructure, inside private credit, rather than a standalone identity with its own front door. There is no single “Partners Group Secondaries Fund” for the market to watch, because there are four of them, running concurrently, each with a multi-decade record most standalone secondaries shops would envy: first-quartile PE vintages since 2008, an 18% net IRR in infrastructure since 2006, top-quartile real estate performance, and a fast-scaling credit vehicle built with one of Europe’s largest insurers.
The 1998 Shell deal is worth remembering not just as trivia, but as a reminder that Partners Group was underwriting illiquid fund stakes before most of today’s GP-led vocabulary existed.