GP-Led Continuation Vehicles Hit $106B in 2025 — And the Market Is Just Getting Started

GP-Led Secondaries: From Niche to Mainstream At the SuperReturn Secondaries Europe conference in London, the conversation kept returning to one topic: the explosive and sustained growth of GP-led secondary transactions. According to Evercore estimates, total secondary market volume hit $226 billion in 2025 — up 40% year-over-year — with GP-led deals accounting for $106 billion of that total. Continuation vehicles (CVs) — structures that allow fund managers to transfer high-quality assets from a maturing fund into a new vehicle while offering existing LPs a choice between liquidity or continued exposure — have become the defining instrument of this boom. Expanding Beyond Buyout: Credit, Infrastructure, and VC Join In Historically, continuation vehicles were almost exclusively a private equity buyout phenomenon. That is rapidly changing. According to practitioners at SuperReturn, a growing minority of CVs are now being initiated by: Private credit managers seeking to retain performing loans beyond fund life Infrastructure funds extending hold periods on core assets Venture capital managers preserving stakes in breakout companies ahead of IPO Cari Lodge, founder and managing partner of Aqualis Partners, observed that the GP-led and LP-led markets are effectively bifurcating: "LP secondaries are the traditional secondaries... providing liquidity to individual LPs. The continuation funds and the GP-led market are more like co-investments if they're single asset, and they're more attuned to a regular buyout fund." Real Estate CVs: Governance in Focus The March 2026 analysis from Goodwin Law highlights the increasing complexity around conflict management in real estate GP-led CVs. As these structures proliferate, regulators and LPs are demanding greater transparency around pricing, valuation independence, and GP economic incentives — particularly in single-asset deals where information asymmetry is highest. Why This Matters for Private Markets GP-led continuation vehicles are no longer a liquidity escape hatch — they are a deliberate fund management strategy. For investors, they offer co-investment-like exposure to proven, high-conviction assets with a known manager track record. For GPs, CVs allow them to extend value creation timelines without forcing premature exits into a soft M&A market. As the 2026 IPO pipeline (SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe) builds, expect a wave of VC-led CVs designed to hold pre-IPO positions through the listing window and beyond.