Capital Still Closes, But Only for Conviction

• KKR closed North America Fund XIV at $23 billion, the largest North America-focused buyout fund ever raised
• The top 10 H1 2026 buyout funds raised $129.3 billion combined
• Four tech-focused GPs, led by Hg at 84% of managed enterprise value in TMT, accounted for half those top 10 raises
• Broadwing Capital's debut fund closed at $440 million, above both target and hard cap
• Kingswood Capital closed $4 billion across two oversubscribed funds in five weeks
• GTCR closed its inaugural $1.25 billion Capital Solutions Fund almost entirely on existing LP relationships
• Pantheon's $3.2 billion global co-investment fund became its largest dedicated vehicle to date
• Brookfield posted its biggest fundraising quarter ever at $77 billion, pushing group AUM past $1 trillion
• With Intelligence puts total H1 2026 fundraising at just over $300 billion

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LPs Are Holding the Line on Distributions

• The University of California sold $1 billion of PE stakes to HarbourVest
• Harvard, Yale and CalPERS also trimmed PE exposure, selling roughly $1 billion, $2.5 billion and $6 billion respectively
• PitchBook puts uninvested US PE capital at $1.07 trillion, with median holding periods stretched to 4.2 years
• Global PE dry powder sits near $2.4 trillion per VRC
• KPMG counts a more than five-year low in rolling 12-month deal volume at 20,105 transactions
• McKinsey's Global Private Markets Report shows global closed-end PE fundraising fell 17% to about $616 billion in 2025
• Funds above $5 billion captured 35% of all capital raised in 2025, per McKinsey
• Average fund close time hit an all-time high of 25 months, per Rede Partners' Liquidity Index
• FTI's 2026 Value Creation Index found only 19% of high-performing PE funds beat their own AI return expectations, against 5% of everyone else

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Secondaries Absorb the Liquidity Gap

• Ares is bundling €3 billion of LP stakes in its eight-year-old Ares Capital Europe IV fund for a secondaries sale
• Ares also raised $7.1 billion in January for its own credit secondaries strategy
• Lazard put H1 2026 secondary market volume at $124 billion and trailing-twelve-month volume at a record $260 billion
• Lazard's report is the backdrop for its agreement to acquire Campbell Lutyens
• Clipway closed the largest-ever debut secondaries fund at $6.4 billion
• Carlyle AlpInvest hit its $1.7 billion hard cap on Atom Fund II
• CVC reported $9.3 billion raised toward its Secondary Opportunities Fund VI
• Sponsors are stacking minority stake sales, GP-led secondaries and NAV loans on the same assets to generate distributions, per White & Case
• Arctos's $10.6 billion purchase of a 10% Atlanta Falcons stake is being used as the template for sports-team continuation funds
• Palico's founder built the platform on the conviction that liquidity, transparency and infrastructure are what private markets still lack

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Fund Structuring Gets More Load-Bearing

• What was one fund a decade ago is now routinely four to six parallel vehicles, sleeves and AIVs
• These structures are built specifically to route capital around CFIUS and national-security rules before a deal, not after
• Co-investment drag-and-tag provisions only tell part of the story once a sponsor needs an exit its syndicate doesn't want
• Information rights, conflict protocols and nominee-director duties become the real leverage in a co-investment dispute
• The basic distinctions still get asked for directly: parallel funds, sidecar funds and co-investments each serve a different purpose

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Winning LP Capital Is Its Own Skill

• One LP-facing investor says he now closes investment decks the moment they read as AI-generated
• A mapped UK LP list splits capital into 150 named family-office decision-makers and 100 named contacts across 83 allocating institutions
• Family offices decide on trust and fit before they discuss returns
• The placement agents worth paying are the ones who genuinely understand their LPs, not the ones reheating PitchBook league tables
• LP diligence is shifting from "what were the returns" to "how did you achieve them"
• One GP's $2.6 million first check grew into $9 million of combined deal volume within a year
• That same GP now counts nearly 100 repeat investors
• Most IR teams lose time not in the LP meeting itself but in the two hours of manual context reconstruction beforehand
• Guernsey's Fund Foundry programme for emerging managers takes applications through 1 September
• A ten-session GCC Private Market Fundamentals cohort for fund managers starts in September

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New Entrants Are Rewriting Who Funds the Fund

• Family offices are now large enough to compete directly with KKR, Blackstone and Carlyle for the same companies, talent and AI deals
• One technology analyst went from one AI-focused family-office call a month to multiple calls a day within a year
• Gaja Capital's ₹550 crore IPO filing would make it India's first case of a PE manager, not a portfolio company, going public
• General Atlantic, Blackstone and Blue Owl are building permanent capital and public-market financing into the GP's own balance sheet
• Semi-liquid evergreen funds are approaching $500 billion in assets, up more than 30% in a single year
• Wealth investors now account for a fifth of that evergreen-fund asset base
• Dynasty Financial, BBR Partners, Beacon Pointe and Corient are all now building their own private-markets funds rather than buying access
• Staying at $31 billion instead of scaling further keeps one infrastructure manager out of auctions its own size would otherwise force it into
• One lower-middle-market buyer has acquired 114 companies at 6.0x since 2015, with 97% sourced directly from founders

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Fundraising Diverges Sharply by Region

• Japan-focused funds raised $15 billion in 2025, up 12% year over year
• APAC's overall share of global PE capital fell from a 2021 peak of 12% to just 5%
• Sunrise Capital's latest $500 million fund closed oversubscribed in five months, 81% from existing LPs
• Take-private premiums in Japan climbed from 30 to 40% up to 60 to 80%
• VRC's European Private Market Update found the region stabilising in Q2 2026
• A regional mapping shows CVC present in all eight tracked European regions
• North American investors own more than 44% of enterprise value across the UK and Ireland's 50 largest PE investors
• OMERS hired a new managing director to lead a more than fivefold ramp-up of its private equity fund allocation

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The People Side of the Capital Cycle

• One deal partner left a PE seat in 2019 to build a GP stakes strategy instead
• Eight checks first-time CFOs are told to run before signing a PE-backed platform offer start with the preference stack
• Charlesbank Capital Partners is promoting two co-managing partners mid-raise on its $4 billion Fund XI
• A mortgage case shows cash co-investment distributions, not salary or bonus, closed a £175,000 financing gap on a director's family home
• 80% of PE operating roles reportedly fill through warm introductions before they are ever posted publicly

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Thanks to Calvin Creutz, Robert Lattanzi, Eliot Kerlin, Kevin Ritter, Elizabeth Hastings, Andrew Reese, Jordan Pinette, David Haarmeyer, Jason Leisey, Deekshant Bakshi, Austin Cornwell, Alexander Lupachev, Derek Shanahan, Danyal Özdüzenciler, Leyla Kunimoto, Peter Orszag, Tridev Budia, Cedric Teissier, Roger Ehrenberg, Antoine Dréan, Jordan Silber, Blake Shaw, Drew Breneman, Taylor Lowe, Charlotte Goncalves, Rachel A. Z., Ronald Diamond, Saranya S Pai, Erik Boender, Charlotte Hogg, Michael Sidgmore, David Weisburd, Jarrett Turner, James Halse, Kavitha Nair, Paul Bourke, Nicola Ebmeyer, Kirk Falconer, Mustafa Siddiqui, Ben Stevens, Chris Witkowsky, David Walsh and Greg Head for contributing insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: