Private Equity Secondaries

Secondaries: Liquidity Tool or Fee Machine? By 2030, secondaries are set to represent nearly 15–20% of global private equity AUM — a structural rise that says as much about liquidity engineering as it does about innovation. Once seen as an afterthought, the secondaries market has become the core liquidity valve of private markets. It allows LPs to recycle capital, manage duration risk, and smooth DPI cycles without waiting for exit windows. Yet it also brings a familiar tension: convenience comes with cost. From a CIO perspective, secondaries sit at the intersection of capital efficiency and complexity. They provide embedded leverage and optionality — freeing allocators to rebalance portfolios without selling into public markets. But each transaction also layers on intermediated fees, valuation friction, and vintage stacking risk. The deeper question is whether the growth of secondaries signals health or dependency. • Health, if it reflects a maturing asset class with credible liquidity mechanics. • Dependency, if it’s just another way to postpone distribution pressure and reprice old risk at new fees. For disciplined allocators, secondaries should be treated as tools, not trends — deployed to rebalance exposure, capture discounts, and compound through cycles, not to chase liquidity optics. The future of private markets will hinge on this balance: using engineered liquidity to enhance discipline, not disguise it. #PrivateEquity #Secondaries #Alternatives #Liquidity #CIOOffice

Luxury brands love to say they're monitoring the secondary market. In 2026, that statement is meaningless. You don’t monitor something that's already shaping your pricing power and client base. The secondary market is no longer adjacent to luxury strategy. It's quietly conditioning it. When resale prices stabilise at strong levels, retail increases feel justified. When secondary values erode quickly or dispersion widens across platforms, pricing authority weakens even if internal dashboards still look healthy. Clients compare: the elasticity you think you control is already being tested elsewhere. Most Maisons don't model this. Primary pricing decisions remain anchored in cost evolution, positioning, and scarcity management. What's rarely formalized is how secondary transaction behavior influences future pricing tolerance. In a searchable, transparent market, that influence's structural. But the bigger strategic miss is client acquisition. Resale is now a 1st point of entry for a large share of buyers. They discover products through platforms, not flagships. They transact before they ever speak to a sales associate. They build preference, confidence and collections outside the brand perimeter. From the brand’s internal systems, they're not prospects. Economically, they're already allocating capital into the brand. That's not a branding issue. It's a perimeter issue. Without an intelligence layer and an operating pathway, the brand captures the halo while platforms capture the relationship. The Maison sees secondary demand as market activity, but it's also a customer funnel except the data, the identities, and the interactions sit elsewhere. The same feedback loop that conditions pricing, conditions acquisition. Strong secondary performances reduce purchase friction, legitimize entry at lower price points, and accelerate category upgrades. Weak secondary performances do the opposite. Either way, the secondary market is already influencing who enters the brand and how. Brands often react instinctively by tightening supply, but without integrating resale signals into a systematic feedback framework that connects pricing power, product hierarchy, and acquisition. That's the real gap: a missing architecture that connects external transactions to internal decisions. In 2026, resale is large enough to influence 3 core levers at once: pricing power, portfolio hierarchy, and client acquisition. If those levers are calibrated without structured integration of secondary performance data, strategy's partially blind and growth's partially intermediated. The brands that build the capability to read and internalize that layer won’t just capture incremental revenue. They'll expand their client perimeter, recover visibility over demand, and make cleaner decisions about what deserves investment. In 2026, resale's not outside your strategy. It's already influencing it. The only question is whether you’re reading the signal or paying for the consequences.

I’m excited to see my latest analysis on the private-credit secondary market in today’s print edition of The Wall Street Journal. While private credit has seen massive capital inflows, we are now watching a significant shift as wealthy investors seek liquidity. From Blackstone's Bcred hitting redemption limits to Fitch Ratings reporting a 9.2% default rate in 2025, the pressure is mounting. $20 Billion and Growing: Secondary transaction volume surged nearly 83% last year as investors look for the exits in BDCs and interval funds. The Discount Game: Institutional buyers like Saba Capital Management, L.P.and Cox Capital Partners are stepping in, eyeing assets at 20% to 35% discounts to NAV. Raising the Gates: As redemption requests surpass quarterly limits, the secondary market is becoming the essential pressure valve for the industry. https://lnkd.in/eyBEDSk5

Private market secondaries, from 2022-2023, experienced fundraising growth in excess of ~100%—the highest of any sector.* Key driving factors of this growth are post-ZIRP portfolio rebalancing as a byproduct of over-exuberance (denominator effect), a relatively closed IPO window, muted M&A activity, and the private markets valuation “lag”, among others.  This broader market reset and increasing robustness of secondaries markets can present a compelling opportunity for private market investors. Investors should broadly consider how their portfolios are positioned with respect to the valuation lag—on both sides—situationally executing dispositions and adding exposure, where favorable.  For example, in 2022, the unprofitable public markets tech index was down ~70% and private market valuations remained largely unchanged—we took this opportunity to conduct a full review of our portfolio exposure to high-growth, unprofitable portfolio companies. As a result, we exited a significant amount of such exposure.   And now, nearing the end of 2024, the converse is largely true—private market valuations have generally lagged those of their public market counterparts—creating a situation where adding exposure via secondaries can be attractive in select pockets of the market.   For example, in private equity, there are instances of indiscriminate selling for both single-asset exposures and LP interests at relatively low multiples (<6x EBITDA) with durable cash flow and strong fundamentals. In such a case, adding exposure can offer favorable risk/return asymmetry.    Here’s a quote from one of our investment partners regarding the opportunity in private equity continuation vehicles, “80-90% of the LPs on the other side of the trade (i.e., the sellers), didn’t even look at the data room.”   Investors should have a deep understanding of underlying valuation policies, actively monitor their exposures, and be proactive in secondaries to create value for clients and generate excess return.  *Source: Pitchbook, 2024.   

In 2024, the VC secondary market was almost half the size of the VC primary market (i.e. VC funds deployed). If the trend holds, annual VC secondary activity will surpass primary activity within the next decade. Is this really a surprise? In 2024, public stock market secondary volume was 100X greater than primary volume. The last time you bought NVIDIA stock, you likely purchased it from another investor (indirectly), not from Nvidia itself. That’s the secondary market. As companies remain private longer, it's reasonable to assume more secondaries will occur. In the past month alone, Caplight's IPO Readiness Tracker flagged Deel conducting a $300 million secondary sale, and Anduril Industries, Revolut, and Cohere doing large tenders. How can the VC ecosystem best prepare for this market shift? LPs: 💧 LPs will have to gauge GPs not only on their ability to find gems but also on their capacity to liquidate them at the right time. ⌛ Liquidity risk will be a bigger consideration, and familiarity with continuation vehicles and LP-interest secondary transactions will be a useful skill set to develop. GPs: 🏃♂️ The #VentureDeals (Brad Feld) approach of allocating 10% of a VC’s time to exits and admin likely won’t cut it. Anecdotally, we’re starting to see the rise of the Chief Liquidity Officer role among the smartest VCs. 📊 VCs will need to develop portfolio management practices akin to those of public portfolio managers. Private companies: 🚰 Companies will have to rethink stock-based compensation management, moving from stock transfer restrictions to controlled liquidity as a tool to avoid talent leakage. ⚖️ Executives will need to balance primary raises with secondary permissiveness as they manage the capital needs of their companies. The good news? This won’t change overnight, and we’re here for you with the tools, analysis, and support you need to make the secondary market your competitive advantage. Sources are linked below. #vc #venturecapital #liquidity #alternativeinvestments #secondarymarket #IPO

If you only watched the stock market tickers in #2025, you missed half the story. While IPOs captured headlines, a quieter shift played out across India’s private ecosystem. Secondary transactions in unlisted companies moved from being occasional to becoming a planned part of liquidity and exit strategies. Early investors, founders and employees increasingly took partial liquidity without forcing an IPO. At the same time, capital actively flowed into proven private businesses through structured secondary routes. The entry and expansion of dedicated secondary funds in India during 2025 underlines how institutional this market has become. Based on industry estimates and reported activity, total secondary transaction volume in India’s unlisted space is estimated at roughly $10Bn to $20Bn in 2025. Most of this activity remains private, but the scale is now hard to ignore. On pricing, most secondary deals were done at sensible discounts to the latest primary valuation, reflecting liquidity, timing, and a win-win for both buyers and sellers. Some of the largest and most active secondary stories of the year included: NSE India - Continued to be among the most actively traded unlisted assets, with strong institutional participation ahead of a potential listing. Lenskart.com - Pre-IPO secondary transactions that allowed early investors and ESOP holders to monetise partially. PhonePe - One of the biggest secondary-led liquidity events, driven largely by employee and early investor exits ahead of its IPO journey. Zepto - Large secondary sales and discussions alongside late-stage funding rounds to provide liquidity while reshaping long-term ownership. 2025 also saw companies like Pine Labs, Shadowfax, Urban Company, BlueStone, Meesho, Fractal, Kuku FM, BharatPe, Flipspaces, Porter (to name a few) where secondary components provided targeted liquidity rather than headline exits. Why this matters: - For LPs, DPI and real cash returns matter more than paper valuations. - For founders and employees, secondaries turn years of effort into real outcomes. - For late-stage investors, they offer access to proven companies with better risk reward ratio. As we enter #2026, the capacity to facilitate secondary liquidity remains a key differentiator for top-tier funds and late-stage startups. incentiv Tabulate Ranjit Sundaram Diganth Jagadish Indranil Tiwary #PrivateMarkets #SecondaryDeals #UnlistedShares #VentureCapital #PrivateEquity #IndiaStartups #Liquidity #Exits

The secondaries market is experiencing a period of dynamic growth, with record-breaking fundraising in traditional private equity and a surge in activity within the specialized credit #secondaries segment. On the #privateequity front, Ardian has raised a record $30 billion for its ninth-gen secondaries platform (ASF IX), the largest secondaries fundraise to date. The fund attracted over 465 global investors from 44 countries: notably, private wealth clients represented 22% of the total equity raised, doubling the 11% participation in the previous fund.  “We are actively capitalizing on a generational buying opportunity for secondaries,” states Mark Benedetti, EP & Co-Head of Secondaries. “With the continued exponential growth in private markets, investors increasingly look to secondary buyers to help them actively manage their PE portfolios. And more recently, with a changing interest rate environment and public market volatility, many find themselves overallocated and in need of a solution.”   Vladimir Colas, EVP & Co-Head of Secondaries added, “The past 12 months marked a record-breaking year for secondaries volume. Using the secondary market for liquidity and portfolio rebalancing is no longer a one-off decision but now an integral part of institutional investors’ private markets investment strategies” Concurrently, the #credit secondaries market is experiencing a significant ramp-up, as evidenced by the recent sale of a sizeable private credit portfolio by the State Board of Administration of Florida to Banner Ridge Partners, LP . This $2.1B NAV transaction, as confirmed by Anthony Cusano, CFA “shows the market and institutional investors that large portfolio management changes at scale are possible with illiquid credit assets and not just private equity portfolios.” FSBA’s John Mogg, CFA, CAIA had previously indicated their interest in exploring the private credit secondaries market, following their success in private equity secondaries. This isn’t an isolated incident. This follows deals like Abry Partners’ $1.6 billion GP-led transaction backed by Coller Capital last year. The growth is also driven by dedicated strategies from firms like Pantheon, Apollo Global Management, Inc. and Ares Management Corporation . Unlike broad-based secondaries funds, these standalone funds target returns consistent with the broader private credit asset class, enabling them to offer sellers more attractive valuations (around 90% of NAV) compared to the discounts historically required by generalist secondaries funds (sometimes as low as 60%). This buyers also addressed initial concerns about the short duration of credit funds, explaining that the recycling of capital within these funds results in a longer duration than initially perceived. In conclusion, the secondaries market is thriving on two fronts: continued investor confidence in traditional PE secondaries, and the burgeoning credit secondaries market, presenting a new avenue of opportunity.

Google's record-setting Wiz acquisition marked a shift for M&A and IPOs. But it's secondaries that are having a moment. OpenAI, Databricks, Ramp, Rippling—all recently ran tenders. And it’s not just about cleaning up the cap table or satisfying an investor’s ownership target. Secondaries are becoming a strategic asset. According to Pitchbook data, more than half of the late-stage growth rounds over the past six months have had a secondary component attached to the deal. This is up from 20%-30% a few years ago. In a prior life I’ve structured secondaries as a part of $100M late-stage fundraises, and they were focused on cleaning up the cap table for inactive investors and prior execs/founders. This new breed of secondaries is primarily for current employees as a way to attract and retain talent. It alleviates pressure for liquidity via M&A or an IPO and provides employees the chance to buy homes, pay off debt, or pay for their kids' school. Investors can solve for ownership targets, management can use it to retain talent, employees can realize financial goals – all without added dilution. If you’re thinking about a secondary, ask yourself: ▶️ Is this about meeting investor ownership targets without additional dilution? ▶️ Rewarding current employees or cleaning up the cap table? If it’s for current employees: ▶️ What percentage or dollar threshold are they allowed to sell to ensure they are still motivated to work hard? For a secondary, you’ll need to share financials, gate participation, navigate internal politics, and really think through every loose end before proceeding. However, when done right, it can create value across stakeholders. 1/ Founders/employees can meet near-term financial goals. 2/ Investors solve for ownership requirements without additional dilution. If you’re raising a later stage round and it’s a competitive deal, it’s worth weighing secondary as an option. Would love your thoughts in the comments!

Over the years, I’ve seen one challenge keep coming up as companies scale: how to manage their cap table. What begins with a small group of founders and early investors can quickly become a complex network of stakeholders (each with different goals). This can lead to a cluttered cap table, making it harder to plan for future fundraising or an exit strategy. For many, this raises the same key question: 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘭𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘺? The answer lies in 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀. Here’s how companies can benefit: ➤ 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗜𝗣𝗢 Direct secondaries provide employees and early investors a mechanism to create liquidity. This process offers liquidity, rewarding early backers and employees for their contributions without waiting for an IPO or acquisition. ➤ 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽 𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 Over time, after multiple funding rounds and employee stock option vesting, cap tables often become very wide and fragmented. Direct secondaries allow companies to control the shareholder base and select new shareholders who can consolidate the cap tables. Stableton is such an investor, continuously buying up shares of target companies, especially in smaller blocks through dozens of transactions, thereby helping consolidate cap tables. ➤ 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 While pure secondary market investors may help with cleaner cap tables, their participation in a new funding round is less clear. Stableton invests across primary funding rounds and secondaries through an evergreen portfolio structure, making it easier for a company to manage future growth and tap into the same investor base. ➤ 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 Secondary market transactions give real-time feedback on how the market values the company. That is especially important as shareholders want to know how much their private shares are actually worth, or when companies prepare for an IPO. We’ve seen how direct secondaries can help companies keep a manageable cap table while rewarding those who played a role in the company’s growth. Direct secondaries offer more than just liquidity. They streamline ownership, offer rewards, and provide essential market feedback.

I've recently spent a lot of time exploring the role of secondaries in venture capital and growth equity. I've witnessed an interesting trend that's reshaping how investors think about liquidity in growth investments. Picture this: Early investors in Slack watched their stakes multiply dramatically as the company scaled to a $27.7B Salesforce acquisition, while Series A backers of Atlassian saw their positions balloon as the company reached $40B+ in market cap. The same story played out with Notion investors, who watched a simple productivity tool evolve into a $10B phenomenon without ever needing traditional IPO routes. Here's the paradox though—while these represent massive investment wins, many early investors remain trapped in illiquid positions for 8-12 years, waiting for exits that, particularly in Europe, are increasingly rare. This is where secondary transactions become game-changing. Take UiPath's journey as a perfect example: before its 2021 IPO, secondary markets allowed early European investors to cash out their 7-10x returns while enabling growth funds to acquire stakes in the robotic process automation leader. Snowflake followed a similar path, with a robust pre-IPO secondary market where investors actively traded positions as the data cloud company scaled from $200M to $70B+ valuation. This dynamic hits differently in B2B software, where companies like Canva ($40B), Stripe ($95B), and Databricks ($43B) have created extraordinary value while staying private for extended periods. Secondary markets have become the solution that keeps the entire ecosystem flowing smoothly. Early investors finally get to monetize their decade-long bets without waiting for uncertain IPO windows. Growth funds gain access to proven, profitable SaaS businesses that would otherwise be impossible to buy into. Meanwhile, these companies maintain their growth trajectory without the dilution and distraction of constant primary fundraising. The result is a more intelligent capital ecosystem where liquidity flows exactly where it's needed most, fueling the next wave of B2B software leaders. What secondary opportunities are you seeing in your network? Because the data suggests we're just scratching the surface of this trend.