General Partners

Single-asset deals remain a popular way for GPs to deliver liquidity back to LPs in older funds without having to fully exit an investment.

Estimated to total about $530bn this year, Michael Rees expects the investable market for GP stakes funds to reach about $749bn by 2025.

HighPost was established in 2019 by David Moross, a veteran of PE investing in the consumer sector, and Mark Bezos, brother of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a former consumer brand developer.

The deal totaled somewhere in the range of $2bn to $2.5bn, making it one of the largest deals of the year.

Impacts from the broader economy, such as inflation, geopolitical turmoil and slower growth, have made it tougher to value assets in secondaries processes, with a wide gap between buyer and seller expectations.

While significant capital has been raised to pursue the flourishing GP-led secondaries opportunity, supply/demand fundamentals remain highly attractive, says Barry Miller, partner in the secondary solutions group at Ares Management.

As supply outstrips demand, GP-leds can prove compelling for secondaries buyers with the right strategy, say Neuberger Berman’s Tristram Perkins, global co-head of secondaries private equity; Frank Guglielmo, principal; and Victor Ko, principal.

The equities group oversaw C$70bn of assets last year, 80% of which were direct interests managed internally. Even among Ontario Teachers’ largest Canadian peers, this is an outsized share.

Many managers have concluded they don’t want to lose out on future growth of assets they’ve developed over a number of years, and continuation funds provide a structure to make that happen.

The presence of a US public pension system as a lead investor is a reflection of the growing sophistication and the desire on the part of some big US public plans to take more direct roles in investment management.