Verdun Perry, the head of Blackstone‘s $87 billion secondary investing business, predicts that the market will grow to $220 billion this year, a nearly 40% jump from last year. The first quarter, usually the slowest for the secondaries market, saw roughly $45 billion in secondaries transactions, Perry said.
After more than three years of “relatively slow” distributions from private equity funds, many investors are “motivated to sell,” Perry said.
Perry said he expected the industry to continue growing regardless of the macro environment given the ballooning size of the private markets in recent decades. Indeed, one-off secondary deals of $1 billion to $2 billion are now relatively commonplace compared to twenty-five years ago, when the market was lucky to clear that much in an entire year.
In light of the sector’s expansion, Business Insider has compiled a list of the top industry professionals in the private secondaries market. BI used recommendations of industry insiders and an accounting of total assets under management at the pros’ respective firms.
The investors who made the cut work for a range of firms, from megafunds like Blackstone and Ares to secondaries specialists like Ardian. They invest across a wide array of strategies, including private equity, real estate, and infrastructure. Their portfolios often include both LP-led deals — where institutional investors sell stakes in private equity funds — and GP-led transactions, in which financial sponsors offer liquidity to existing investors without offloading the underlying assets. These structures have become more common as overall deal flow remains subdued across the industry.
They have spent decades watching the industry transform from a niche to a must-have strategy. Many of them didn’t even know what secondary investing was when they were first recruited but are now leading this growing business at some of the largest and most powerful investment firms.
Jeffrey Akers, Adams Street, partner and head of secondary investments
Akers got his start as an investment banker at a regional bank, researching the private markets long before every private equity buyer was just a Google search away. His early experience evaluating private equity managers helped lead Akers to join Adams Street nearly 20 years ago as a secondaries investor.
He has now led the firm’s secondary investing team for nearly nine years, helping grow its assets under management to $8.5 billion.
Akers said he was drawn to Adams Streetbecause of its impressive fund of funds offering, which boasts over a thousand active investments in private equity funds.
Access to data and relationships is critical, and the firm fosters close collaboration between its primary and secondary teams through dedicated “GP pods.”
“For each of our key general partners, we have a group of professionals internally from each of our underlying strategies to share company insights, sourcing ideas, and portfolio updates,” Akers said. “These little insights can be critical to differentiating our underwriting in a situation, and that collaboration has been enormously valuable.”
In addition to fostering teamwork, Akers also chairs the secondary investment committee and continues to source deals. He sees volatility being a big boon for the industry.
“We’re maybe the one investment group in our offices around the world that gets excited when we see some market volatility because it usually does create a great buying opportunity,” Akers said.
Mark Benedetti and Vladimir Colas, co-heads of secondaries at Ardian
Benedetti first joined Ardian in 2006, when the French firm launched its first US office in New York City. He and Colas were two of the firm’s three US-based employees.
The secondaries industry was “hyper-niche,” Benedetti said, but he and Colas were about to land several large deals that helped put them on the map.
The pair closed a $1.9 billion deal with Bank of America in 2010, leading to similarly large deals with GE and Citibank and eventually relationships with pension and sovereign wealth funds, according to reporting at the time.
This year, Ardian announced it had raised the largest secondaries fund in the world at $30 billion, making it the industry’s largest secondaries investor with $97 billion in assets under management.
The fund is already half-invested, said Colas, with an average deal size of $2 billion. He sees the market continuing to grow at a fast pace, with many transactions from the past two years coming from first-time sellers. He predicts this will most likely lead to even more deals.
“Once they see it’s actually fairly efficient, you can move a portfolio of $2 billion, $3 billion pretty quickly,” Colas said. Benedetti added that more than half of the fund’s secondaries deals were from repeat sellers.
Fundraising, not seller demand, will be the biggest roadblock, Colas said.
Colas and Benedetti now juggle more than just dealmaking — they sit on Ardian’s investment and general management committees, lead a 110-person secondaries team, and engage with prospective sellers exploring the market. Still, they aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
“Just yesterday,” Benedetti said, “we called an emergency meeting with the two of us and a team of six people hunkered down in a conference room for four hours to make a go-no-go decision for our final pricing on two multibillion-dollar deals.”
Edward Keith, Ares, partner and head of infrastructure secondaries
Seven years into his secondaries career, Keith helped launch a new line of business at Ares: investing in infrastructure assets. At the time, Landmark — now Ares’ secondaries platform following its 2021 acquisition — was already a powerhouse in private equity and real estate secondaries.
“In 2014, I brought a couple of new investors to the firm who wanted to invest in real assets,” Keith said. “Having brought them in, I was now responsible for managing that program. I was thrust into a position of responsibility very early in my career.”
Landmark was one of the first funds to launch an infrastructure secondaries fund, just as infrastructure was emerging as a sought-after asset class among buyout professionals. The pitch was simple: By investing later in the life cycle of an asset, investors could avoid the up-front capital expenditures that often came with these sorts of investments, benefiting instead from the stable income often associated with these investments.
Still, it was a challenging time.
“I’d say North American investors were very comfortable in secondaries, but very few of them actually had infra allocations,” Keith said, using shorthand for infrastructure. “You go to some places in Europe and they’ve got a very good feel for infrastructure, but haven’t really done secondaries.”
Keith has led the business since its inception, watching both the infrastructure and the secondary markets evolve from exciting experiments to essential components of the private markets. As the market continues to expand, Keith expects deal activity to accelerate.
“If you look at secondaries historically, you can predict the future pretty well by looking at how much capital’s gone into a private market,” Keith said. “Infrastructure has been extraordinarily fast-growing in terms of the amount of capital that gets raised.”
Verdun Perry, global head of Blackstone Strategic Partners
This August, Perry will have spent a quarter century working for Strategic Partners, one of the largest secondaries investors in the world. In that time, the firm’s ownership has changed three times, from the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, to Credit Suisse, to, finally, Blackstone in August 2013.
Perry, who led negotiations for Strategic Partners, alongside Stephen Can, his then cohead and a founding partner, described the union with Blackstone as “aspirational.”
Under his leadership, the firm has grown from 27 professionals managing $9 billion in assets to 141 people managing $87 billion in assets.
“Over the last 24 years, we believe that my team has done more secondary deals than anyone else,” Perry said. “More than 2,200 deals, or one deal every three business days, on average.”
When Perry started, deals could be as small as $100,000. Now they could range from $1 million to over $5 billion.
“We recently completed what we believe to be the largest secondaries deal in history,” Perry said, referencing Strategic Partners’ $5.0 billion purchase of private equity funds from a major pension fund, which a person with knowledge of the matter said involved New York City’s nearly $300 billion pension for teachers, police officers, and other city workers.
“It was $5 billion across over 100 underlying funds, with over 70 general partners and over 750 underlying companies,” he said. “We had a matter of weeks to value that portfolio.”
While the team has deep expertise in LP-led transactions, it has since expanded into GP-led deals, as well as real estate and infrastructure secondaries — each supported by dedicated funds. Perry has played a key role in that evolution, helping bring the secondaries market into the broader investment mainstream.
“I am one of the spokespeople for this market and have helped to put a face and a philosophy on what it is that we do,” Perry said.
Chris Perriello, global head of secondaries at Carlyle AlpInvest
When Perriello first joined AlpInvest in 2007, the firm had about 20 people and managed capital exclusively for two Dutch pensions. Carlyle acquired a stake in 2011, completing the purchase in 2013.
At about the same time, AlpInvest launched its first fund with outside capital, raising $700 million from 18 investors.
“We went from that to today, where we have several hundred LPs,” Perriello said. The team now has more than 50 professionals focused on the secondary market.
The firm declined to comment on fundraising specifics, but Carlyle CFO John Redett said in a May earnings call that the firm was getting ready to close its latest secondary fund soon.
Perriello said he’s proudest of his role helping transform AlpInvest from the captive arm of a pension fund to a third-party fundraising organization. It now has over $34 billion in committed capital, $18 billion of which is in GP-led deals.
“I think my success here really came from my ability, together with the senior team, to lead the transition to a third-party fundraising organization and all the things that come with that fundraising,” said Perriello, who became cohead of the business in 2023.
He now travels a lot in his role helping the firm raise money.
“If you look at the Middle East and Asia, they’ve become big investors in secondary funds,” Perriello said. “That’s where I spend a lot of my time, out on the road, outside of the US.”
GP-led transactions — where private equity sponsors turn to secondaries investors to provide liquidity for their LPs — have become much more common in recent years. But AlpInvest has been active in this space from the start. In fact, its first deal was a GP-led transaction.
“What really separates us has been the fact that we didn’t just get into the single-asset space in 2018, or we didn’t start doing continuation funds in 2014,” Perriello said.
Vincent Gombault, managing partner, Clipway
Gombault cofounded Ardian’s secondary team in 1998, back when the firm was still part of the French insurance giant Axa.
“At the time we raised a fund of $300 million,” he said. “By the time I left the company, it was a $33 billion platform.”
As Ardian expanded, so did Gombault’s travel schedule — managing operations across 18 offices. Eventually, he retired and sold his shares. But retirement didn’t suit him.
“I’m not passionate about golf,” he joked.
That’s when a former Ardian colleague, Ingmar Vallano, reached out. The two shared a vision: building software to automate the number crunching that underpins the secondaries market.
“The whole industry runs on Excel models,” Gombault said. “Excel is good, but it’s 40 years old.”
They began working on a new software system, now named Tech-Enabled Secondaries System. The software automates portfolio data extraction from a wide range of sources — quarterly reports, news articles, and more — fundamentally transforming the secondaries workflow, Gombault said.
“In secondaries, 80% of the team’s time is spent on data crunching on Excel, which, if you know the salaries of private equity, that doesn’t make sense,” Gombault said. “Today, we swapped this ratio to 20% on controlling the data, and 80% on value-added work.”
The firm, which was founded in 2023 with backing from asset managers General Atlantic and Carmignac, declined to comment on when it might launch its first fund.
At Clipway, there are just as many tech staffers as there are investment staffers — and Gombault said they are paid like investment staff, including a form of compensation known as carried interest and an underlying share in the business.
“It is very funny because now I don’t know if Clipway is a technology company or an investment company,” Gombault said. He said TESS had proved game-changing because it could dramatically shorten the time needed to underwrite a portfolio with 50 funds or 500 companies. “To do that today, you need a team of 20 or 30 people working for three weeks or a month,” he said. “With TESS, it takes a team of 10 one week at most.”
Jeremy Coller, chief investment officer and managing partner of Coller Capital
Coller has helmed Coller Capital since he founded it in 1990, and he credits Saddam Hussein of all people for convincing him to venture into private equity secondaries.
“In the late 1980s, private equity had been booming for a few years, everyone wanted a piece of it,” Coller told BI in an email. “Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and suddenly investors got spooked and needed liquidity, and fast. So I thought if everyone was desperate to sell, it was a great time to be a buyer.”
When Coller started, there were just a few million dollars of deals annually in the market. Since then, the firm has racked up a range of firsts, including the first European secondary fund and the first global secondary fund.
Now, with 10 offices across four continents and $38 billion AUM, Coller Capital continues to set records. Last year, it completed the largest GP-led private credit secondary transaction, a $1.6 billion deal alongside Abry Capital. The firm has also launched offerings to bring secondaries investment to the private wealth market, broadening its investor base beyond institutional investors.
The Coller CIO’s success extends to philanthropy. He endowed the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University, where he’s deputy chairman of the board of governors.
Coller sees both his firm and the broader market continuing to grow, expecting total annual secondaries volume of at least $500 billion a year.
“Every time it looks like we’ve reached the top, we raise the bar a little higher,” he said. “The next highlight is always just around the corner.”
Harold Hope, global head of secondaries, vintage funds, Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs is best known for its investment bank, which facilitates thousands of deals. But its asset management arm also houses one of the largest secondaries investment platforms in the world, investing over $80 billion since it was founded in 1998.
When Hope joined the secondaries team in 2001, there were just four people on the team, he said, adding that there was a lot of room for innovation back then.
He recalled a wave of “spin-out” deals the firm did during the 2000s banking M&A boom, turning banks’ captive private equity arms into stand-alone funds after mergers, alongside more traditional LP-led deals.
“We did the first deal in the US back in 2001 after Wachovia and First Union merged,” Hope said.
That spirit of innovation has helped catapult Goldman’s secondaries unit from a $400 million fund with just four people to one with more than $40 billion in assets and 90 investment employees, including more than 10 dedicated engineers, known as quantitative strategists.
Hope, who has led or co-led the team since 2008, sees continued innovation ahead as some of the same tools used in the public markets are applied to the private markets.
“It’s very attractive to people to apply the same playbook they’re using in more liquid structures to the private markets in order to free up some liquidity to concentrate on managers they like better,” he said.
Keith Brittain, cohead of secondaries at Hamilton Lane
Brittain started out in investment banking, which prepared him well when he joined Hamilton Lane as a secondaries investor 15 years ago.
“I knew how to value companies, how to execute and negotiate transactions, and I knew a lot of private equity firms,” Brittain said. “That was the connection for me.”
Hamilton Lane was taking a chance on him, too, he said. “I didn’t know much about secondaries,” Brittain said. “But I learned quickly.”
Now, Brittain is cohead of the platform, which boasts $24 billion in assets under management.
Among his biggest milestones: He helped raise $5.6 billion for Hamilton Lane’s sixth secondary fund — announced last year as the firm’s largest closed-end fund to date.
He’s also taken on a leadership role sourcing deals, helping double the team’s deal flow in recent years.
Brittain sees more growth ahead. Before Trump’s tariff proclamations rattled markets in April, deal flow in the market was up 60% from last year, “on pace to be another record year,” Brittain said. Activity has remained strong since, but buyers are becoming more selective, targeting higher-quality funds, he said.
“We will have another year where liquidity is going to be top for investors,” Brittain said. “That’s going to lead to more volume in the secondary market.”
Jeffrey Keay, HarbourVest managing director, chair of secondary investment committee
Keay joined HarbourVest in 1999, becoming the fifth member of a secondaries team that has been active since 1986. Over the past 38 years, the firm has committed $62 billion to the strategy.
Now a key figure atop the firm’s secondaries investment committee, Keay credits HarbourVest’s long-standing leadership stability for its success in the space.
“Our team’s founder, Fred Maynard, and his partner, John Begg, were the only managing directors who have ever left the secondary team,” Keay said. Both retired over a decade ago, and Keay soon stepped into his current role. Today, the team has grown to more than 60 members worldwide.
“We’ve gone from doing a couple hundred million dollars a year in a busy year to — I’m guessing we will invest $10 billion into the market this year,” Keay said.
While HarbourVest was one of the earliest entrants into the secondaries market, Keay said it had continued to innovate. The firm has long been active in GP-led deals. Keay pointed to its spin-out transactions, which helped launch several now-prominent private equity firms — beginning with MidOcean Partners, the $11 billion AUM firm that HarbourVest spun out of Deutsche Bank.
“They picked a name and became an independent buyout manager,” Keay said. “We’ve since done that dozens of times.”
Despite his deep experience, Keay no longer spends much time landing deals — the original “passion” that he says brought him to secondaries. Instead, he focuses on mentoring the next generation of HarbourVest investors.
“I didn’t create the culture at HarbourVest, which has been essential to our success,” he said, “but I do view that I play a key role in preserving that culture.”
Wilson Warren, president of Lexington Partners
Warren joined Lexington Partners just as the firm spun out of Landmark Partners, one of the earliest secondaries specialists, which is now owned by Ares. That was back in 1994, when the secondaries industry had barely begun.
Lexington, with over $40 billion invested in secondaries, has grown to one of the world’s largest investors in the space. In 2020, it set a record for the largest secondaries fund in the world with $14 billion raised.
The firm’s success attracted the attention of the asset manager Franklin Templeton, which acquired Lexington for $1.75 billion in 2021, more than Ares paid for Landmark earlier that year.
Lexington, which remains under Warren’s leadership, has been busy ever since.
The firm has been working on a deal for a stake of the Harvard endowment’s private equity allocation since late last year, according to a person with direct knowledge. As university endowments face continued challenges under the Trump administration, similar transactions are expected to follow.
This year, the firm launched a secondaries fund for private wealth investors, reaching nearly $1 billion in AUM. It’s part of a broader trend of bringing wealthy individuals into the mix alongside traditional institutional capital.
Lexington did not respond to comment requests for this story.
Ben Perl and Tristram Perkins, managing directors and global coheads of secondary private equity, Neuberger Berman
Perkins has been investing in secondary private markets since the 1990s, beginning his career at the storied Wall Street firm Bankers Trust before its acquisition by Deutsche Bank in 1999. A veteran of the space, Perkins is bullish on today’s environment.
“Having invested in secondary private equity for more than two decades, this appears to me to be one of the most attractive environments I have experienced,” he told BI.
After Deutsche Bank exited its private equity investments, Perkins and some of his Bankers Trust colleagues jumped to Neuberger Berman, launching the firm’s secondaries platform with an $800 million fund in 2005. Neuberger’s secondaries business has since raised $20 billion for secondaries investments, including a real estate secondaries arm helmed by Scott Koenig.
Perl, who joined the firm after working as a private equity investor for Lehman Brothers, eventually joined Perkins’s team.
“One of the things I loved about the secondary market was the opportunity to complete dozens of investments in a given year, Perl said. “Many of my peers at buyouts firms only make one or two investments a year, and some years they don’t make any at all.”
Now a managing director, Perl has played a key role in expanding Neuberger’s secondaries platform, which has completed over $16 billion in GP-led deals across 55 transactions since its founding.
Perl said he’d seen deals grow more complicated as the industry matured, especially financial sponsor deals. He recalled a recent GP-led transaction involving a private equity firm managing five companies within a $5 billion fund.
“One of the things they said to me at the end of the process was that this was one of the hardest transactions they had ever done,” Perl said. “They said it was like landing five planes simultaneously.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/private-equity-secondaries-power-players-blackstone-ares-goldman-sachs-clipway2025-5#mark-benedetti-and-vladimir-colas-co-heads-of-secondaries-at-ardian-2
