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Private capital investors offloaded a record amount of stakes in ageing funds last year, as the buyout sector’s difficulties in exiting investments prompted institutional investors to look for another way to cash in.
David Atterbury of HarbourVest Partners, a leading buyer of such stakes, estimated that more than $110bn in so-called secondary deals — in which investors sell their stakes in funds — were struck globally in 2025, up about a quarter on 2024’s $89bn, which was also a record.
The boom in activity in what was once a niche market reflects the challenges facing the buyout industry, with a difficult market for selling or listing past investments, and the maturing of the wider $22tn private capital sector.
Private capital investors traditionally had to lock their money up for years at a time. But the growth of the secondary market has allowed backers to generate cash even without fund managers selling underlying holdings.
“With liquidity at a premium and markets rattled by tariff-driven shocks, asset owners and managers increasingly turned to secondary deals to unlock cash and rebalance portfolios,” said Atterbury, who oversees Europe, the Middle East and Asia at HarbourVest.
Richard Hope, co-head of investments at private markets firm Hamilton Lane, also said sales of fund stakes had broken records in 2025.
The totals included sales of holdings across all private capital strategies such as private credit, venture capital and infrastructure as well as private equity.
Stakes in buyout vehicles dominated the supply of ageing fund positions in the first half of 2025, accounting for more than half, according to Jefferies, as pension funds overweight on the asset class sold holdings to rebalance their portfolios.
“Private markets overall are growing and secondaries are a part of that growth story,” said Hope.
When combined with another form of secondary transaction — where buyout firms raise so-called continuation vehicles to buy older assets from past funds — the overall market for ageing holdings was likely to have seen more than $200bn of transactions in 2025, according to Hope, although final data for the year is not yet available.
Funds dedicated to buying second-hand private capital investments had raised $118bn by November, putting them on track for a record year, data from PitchBook shows.
Jeremy Coller, founder of Coller Capital and an early pioneer of the secondaries market, said he thought this year would bring another increase.
“We could see the record tumble again in 2026,” he said, “perhaps pushing $300bn on its way to becoming an asset class in its own right.”