Weekly Private Equity Edition
Volume 13
SEQH CAPITAL RESEARCH
Private Equity Edition – Weekly Brief
Week Ending February 6, 2026
Top Takeaways (Past Two Weeks)
Mega‑cap buyouts and strategic take‑privates are back, with record transaction sizes signaling a decisive end to the 2024–25 “deal drought.”
Exit activity and realizations are finally inflecting, but fundraising remains uneven, reinforcing a “haves vs. have‑nots” dynamic across managers and strategies.
Secondaries, continuation funds, and NAV‑based solutions have become core liquidity tools, not niche side-cars, reshaping how LPs and GPs manage duration and distributions.
Private credit continues to scale and diversify, with growing retail access and a shift toward specialty finance and distressed strategies.
For everyday allocators, the opening of GP‑stakes, semi‑liquid private credit, and secondaries access products is as important as any single headline deal.
Market Pulse: Dealmaking, Exits, and Flows
Dealmaking has transitioned from “frozen” to selectively aggressive, led by mega‑platforms deploying record dry powder into large, defensible assets. January private equity and venture entries reached roughly 62 billion dollars in announced value, up about 80% year over year, even as the number of deals fell to 840 from 1,273 a year earlier. This confirms a clear bifurcation: fewer but significantly larger transactions, with capital concentrating in higher‑conviction situations.
Exit momentum is finally improving after two years of suppressed realizations. PitchBook reports that exit value has surged even as fundraising struggles, a classic late‑cycle pattern where GPs prioritize DPI and LP liquidity before raising follow‑on vehicles. Listed managers like Carlyle are starting to show the impact: Q4 profit beat expectations as PE and credit realizations drove net realized performance revenue to about 123 million dollars, and the stock rallied more than 7% on the print. This validates the thesis that public GP earnings are a leading indicator of private exit velocity.
From a flows perspective, capital is increasingly being recycled within the ecosystem. Sponsor‑to‑sponsor deals, continuation vehicles, and secondaries are absorbing assets that might historically have gone public in an IPO window. For LPs, that means more options to take liquidity or roll into new structures, but also greater complexity in underwriting fees, conflicts, and alignment.
Key Structural Trends: Secondaries, GP‑Led Solutions, and GP Stakes
Secondaries are now a core pillar of private markets rather than a niche contingency plan. Total global secondary transaction volume reached about 226 billion dollars in 2025, up 41% versus 2024, with GP‑led deals growing to 106 billion dollars from a prior high of 71 billion dollars. Continuation funds have moved mainstream, with nearly half of asset managers using them to unlock liquidity while retaining exposure to high‑conviction assets. These vehicles give LPs a formal choice: take cash today or roll into a new, often more concentrated structure with fresh capital and extended duration.
At the same time, GP‑stakes strategies and ownership of the managers themselves are opening to wealth channels. CAZ Investments just launched a GP‑stakes fund for high‑net‑worth and advisory platforms, offering daily subscriptions and quarterly redemptions into a portfolio of minority stakes in more than 100 private asset managers. This means individual investors can effectively buy into the management‑fee and carried‑interest streams of diversified alternative managers, rather than only their underlying funds. For institutions, the growth of GP‑stakes and continuation vehicles reinforces a “barbell” between highly institutionalized platforms and a long tail of subscale GPs struggling to keep pace.
NAV‑based credit facilities and preferred‑equity solutions are also scaling as tools to bridge timing gaps, fund bolt‑ons, or accelerate partial distributions without forcing outright exits. These structures can smooth cash flows and enhance IRR optics, but they introduce additional layers of leverage and structural complexity that LPs must price explicitly.
Private Credit: From Niche to Systemic
Private credit enters 2026 as a systemic pillar of the financing stack rather than a marginal lender. Preqin projects private credit AUM to more than double to around 4.5 trillion dollars by 2030, with fundraising expected to re‑accelerate this year after a 2025 pause. Direct lending remains the core strategy, but flows are increasingly diversifying into distressed, special situations, asset‑backed finance, and evergreen or semi‑liquid vehicles that can serve wealth and retirement channels.
Fundraising leadership is shifting geographically and by strategy. European private debt funds represented about 35% of private credit fundraising in the first nine months of 2025, up from roughly 24% in 2023 and 2024, while North America‑specific funds fell to 28% of the total versus about half in prior years. Specialty finance raised about 37 billion dollars in 2025, more than the previous two years combined and second only to direct lending at 79 billion dollars, after representing just 5% of fundraising in 2023 and 3.6% in 2024.
CLOs, BDCs, and semi‑liquid private‑credit funds are the main transmission channels into public and retail markets. CLO issuance has allowed GPs to package and distribute loan exposure more efficiently, while semi‑liquid funds give wealth platforms interval‑style access to credit portfolios. For allocators, this creates a continuum from traditional bank loans to private unitranche, to asset‑backed credit, all the way to distressed and special situations, with differing drawdown risk and liquidity trade‑offs.
Implications for PE Pros vs Everyday Investors
