GP-Led Secondaries Just Became a Real Fourth Exit Route, Not a Stopgap
Continuation vehicles used to be the move for a fund that couldn't sell. In 2025, sponsors started using them to hold onto their best companies instead.
NEW YORK, September 2, 2026. Secondary market volume hit a record in 2025. Jefferies puts the total at $240B, up 48% year over year. That splits roughly $125B in LP-led deals and $115B in GP-led deals. Lazard's count runs higher: $233B total, up 53%, with $116B on the GP-led side. Evercore puts GP-led volume lower still, at $106B. The banks don't agree on the exact number. They do agree GP-led secondaries roughly doubled in two years. The market now sits close to parity with LP-led deals, which used to dwarf it.
The pace tells the story better than the total. Jefferies counted $68B of GP-led volume in the second half of 2025 alone. That nearly matched all of 2024. Deals over $1B are becoming routine: 29 of them priced in 2025, up from 21 the year before, averaging roughly $900M each. Single-asset continuation vehicles, once the exception, made up more than half of total CV volume for the first time.
What's moved is who's using them, and why. Vista Equity Partners ran a roughly $5.6B continuation fund around its stake in Cloud Software Group, the largest single CV of the year. CapVest Partners valued its nuclear-medicine business at about $7B in a CV backed by TPG, ICG, and CVC Secondary Partners. Twin Brook Capital Partners, TPG's mid-market credit platform, closed a $3B rollover in August. That's the largest credit-asset CV to date. Inflexion moved four portfolio companies, including Aspen Pumps and Rosemont Pharmaceuticals, into a single vehicle worth roughly GBP 2.3B. None of these are distressed sales. Sponsors are extending their hold on assets that are working.
Repeat usage backs that up. Survey data tied to William Blair and PCA puts repeat sponsors at 42% of CV volume in 2025. General Atlantic, New Mountain Capital, and Vista all ran multiple multibillion-dollar CVs over the year. These aren't one-off rescues. A structure built to solve a liquidity problem is turning into one GPs choose on purpose, for companies they don't want to let go of yet.
The exit backlog gives the trend its urgency. Private equity is sitting on roughly $3.8 trillion in unsold portfolio companies. Neither the IPO market nor strategic buyers have absorbed enough of it. LPs still want distributions. A continuation vehicle lets a GP deliver some of that cash without forcing a full sale at a price nobody wants to accept. Call it a fourth exit route, alongside IPOs, sponsor-to-sponsor deals, and trade sales. Unlike the other three, this one lets the seller stay in the deal.