1. France, first half of 2026: fundraising down 30% outside infrastructure, steady investment and a rebound in exits (+24% including infrastructure, about +4% excluding it), the average holding period of exited companies coming to 7.0 years, its highest level since 2022
The 42nd edition of the France Invest × Grant Thornton activity study (October 2026; 354 respondents out of 382 members surveyed, a 93% coverage rate) takes stock of French private equity in H1 2026. Excluding infrastructure funds, fundraising totalled €10.2 billion, down 30% on H1 2025 — and down 15% excluding continuation funds; buyout fundraising falls while growth rebounds on a few large closings, and venture marks time for lack of sizeable raises. On the LP side, funds of funds remain the largest category of investors in the funds raised, despite a 56% drop in their subscriptions, closely followed by insurers and mutuals (whose subscriptions rise 73%); next come pension funds, which contribute €1.18 billion (12% of the €10.2 billion raised) with a 509% increase year on year, the public sector (€1.05 billion, or 10%, down 58%), banks (€0.84 billion, –49%) and sovereign wealth funds (€0.56 billion, +16%); foreign investors (subscribers whose geographic origin is outside France) provide 46% of amounts raised, above the 2021–2025 level. Investment, by contrast, is stable in value: €10.6 billion into 1,264 companies (excluding infrastructure); continuation funds’ share of amounts invested falls back to 5%, against 10% in H1 2025, after their investments multiplied by 3.9 between 2024 and 2025.
Exits are the figure to retain: €4.8 billion divested at historical cost (excluding infrastructure) against €4.6 billion a year earlier, across 598 companies against 574; including infrastructure, which drives the rebound, the total reaches €6.1 billion (+24%) across 630 companies (+6%). The study notes that trade (industrial) sales return to their historical level after several half-years of decline since H1 2023, that sales to other funds remain stable despite the drop in continuation-fund activity, and that write-offs are rising across all segments; the average holding period of companies fully exited comes to 7.0 years in H1 2026, against 6.7 years in 2025 and 6.1 years in 2022 (an average of 6.6 years over 2022–H1 2026, across 2,543 companies sold): 7.1 years for growth capital and buyout, stable since 2024 (7.2 years), but rises more sharply for venture and growth, to 6.9 years against 6.2 years in 2025 and 5.4 years in 2022. This series is published for the first time in this edition; for reference, France Invest’s value-creation study (December 2025, data to end-2024) measures an average holding period of about 5.1 years across 232 full-exit operations from 2019 to 2024 (French companies acquired through buyout, with €20 million to €500 million of revenue at exit), and 5.4 years for 2024 exits, but on a different sample and with a different method, so these figures are not comparable with those of the activity study. Methodological note: as in the study’s series since 2010, exit amounts are measured at historical acquisition cost, not at exit price; they are therefore not comparable with the exit values published by other sources, such as PitchBook (value of US private equity exits, section 3) or Bain & Company (value of buyout-backed exits worldwide: $717 billion in 2025). Across all the activities France Invest tracks, infrastructure funds included, fundraising reaches €16.8 billion (–7% on H1 2025) and investment €14.4 billion (–8%).
Sources: France Invest × Grant Thornton, “Activité des acteurs du capital-investissement français — 1er semestre 2026”, 42nd edition (October 2026; study reserved for France Invest members); France Invest, “Création de valeur dans les PME et ETI françaises” (December 2025); J’aime les startups, citing France Invest (13 Oct 2026); Bain & Company, Global Private Equity Report 2026.
📖 Going further: 29. Qu’est-ce qu’un fonds de continuation et pourquoi rencontre-t-il un tel succès ? (in French)
2. Partners Group: when the manager’s difficulties confirm that the “periodic liquidity” of evergreen funds is a capped promise, not a guarantee of exit
On 15 October 2026, Bloomberg (followed the next day by Private Equity Wire and finews) reported that Partners Group — the Swiss private-markets manager listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange, overseeing about $186 billion in assets, of which $85.8 billion is private equity (about 46% of its $184.9 billion of assets under management at 31 December 2025) — had cut or reassigned dozens of positions in its private equity division, which has more than 200 staff and is led by Wolf-Henning Scheider: some employees left the group, others moved to its infrastructure and royalties businesses (royalties: a share of an asset’s gross revenue — for example an intellectual-property right such as copyrights, patents or licences, a drug, or natural-gas production — operated by a third party that bears the operating costs), following a performance review. The firm says the team’s size “remains within the long-term average”; yet the context is one of a share price down roughly 40% since the start of the year, the short seller Grizzly Research (“Grizzly Reports” in the firm’s press release), whose 29 April 2026 report questions the valuation of some assets — which Partners Group called defamatory and rebutted several of its allegations on 30 April (the assets cited, the evergreen share of revenue, software exposure) —, and older portfolios said to have lagged those of several competitors.
It mainly points to a sharp rise in redemption requests on the evergreen products, i.e. funds open to private wealth whose holders can, in principle, exit at regular intervals. The firm had announced on 2 October that it would split its Global Value SICAV (its evergreen private equity fund for private clients, a Luxembourg-law open-ended investment company that holds unlisted assets yet accepts periodic redemptions; net asset value of about $7.4 billion, or €6.6 billion) into two sub-portfolios run by the same team: one meant to compound capital over time, the other to distribute proceeds as exits occur. Bloomberg describes them as a portfolio of older assets and one of recent assets, from which the firm expects higher returns; the idea is to let investors who want their money back leave, while those staying for the long term keep their exposure to the recent assets. It also states, per Private Equity Wire, that the firm has written its investment in Pharmathen down to zero (a €20 million position held by Partners Group Private Equity, the London-listed fund, written down in June 2026 after a US FDA import alert, per QuotedData), is discussing handing control of Schleich to its creditors (the 2019 buyout was financed with a €175 million term loan and a €40 million revolving facility, both maturing in 2026, per PE Insights; the purchase price and Partners Group’s equity cheque are not public), and has considered injecting €200 million into Emeria, which carries about €3.5 billion of debt (Private Equity Wire, 10 June 2026).
These requests are not new. On 3 June 2026 Partners Group set a quarterly cap on withdrawals from the same fund of 5% of net asset value, after requests reached an estimated 9.8% in the second quarter and only 62% were met in May (a fund of about $8.6 billion at that date, against a net asset value of about $7.4 billion in early October; the sources consulted do not explain the gap). On 16 July the firm put H1 net inflows into its evergreen funds at $4.2 billion, almost cancelled out by $3.8 billion of redemptions, and estimated that the platform could slow growth in assets under management by 1–2% in 2026 and 2027.
The lesson for LPs and advisers is that the “periodic liquidity” of an evergreen is not a guarantee of exit but a promise bounded by a cap (here 5% of NAV per quarter) — a cap that is, in the manager’s own words, “an indispensable feature” of the asset class to protect remaining investors, and which reveals above all how hard it is to speed up the sale of unlisted assets when exit requests exceed what the fund can repay.
Sources: Yahoo Finance / Benzinga, citing Bloomberg (15 Oct 2026); finews (16 Oct 2026); QuotedData (12 Jun 2026); PE Insights, Schleich; Private Equity Wire, Emeria (10 Jun 2026); Partners Group, Q&A on royalties (Sept 2025); finews, Partners Group royalties strategy (H1 2026); Swissinfo, citing Bloomberg (16 Oct 2026); Private Equity Wire (16 Oct 2026); background: Benzinga (2 Oct 2026); Bloomberg Tax (29 Apr 2026); Partners Group press release (30 Apr 2026); Partners Group, 2025 results (AuM at 31 Dec 2025); Hargreaves Lansdown (3 Jun 2026); Swissinfo (16 Jul 2026).
📖 Going further: 12. Le Private Equity s’ouvre (vraiment) aux particuliers (in French)
3. US private equity in the third quarter: activity down about 14% and a market narrowing around a handful of managers
On 12 October 2026, Fortune (Allie Garfinkle) reported PitchBook’s third-quarter figures for US private equity: year on year (Fortune does not name the comparison period, here Q3 2025), exit value fell 14.1% and deal value 13.6%. US private equity manages more than $3 trillion (a figure Fortune gives without a source), but growth in those assets has slowed to roughly half the 12% annual pace of the past ten to fifteen years. PitchBook analyst Kyle Walters, quoted by Fortune, calls the situation “the new norm”, says fundraising “has definitely gotten harder over the last 18 to 24 months” and that “fewer managers are crossing the finish line”, so they compete for a smaller share of available capital. Fortune also reports that KKR reached its $300 billion fundraising goal, in 30 months against an original three years — a textbook case of the concentration the analyst describes — and that, per PitchBook, a rate hike could make Q4 look much like Q3, though below 2025 levels and still above the 2022–2023 lows.
These figures extend a series this review has followed for weeks: in Q2, PitchBook measured US deal value at $177.3 billion, the lowest since late 2020, and H1 fundraising of $159.6 billion against $184.4 billion for all of 2025 (PitchBook, via AsiaAsset, 13 July 2026). The concentration of capital among the most established managers, which Week 41 documented for Europe (88.5% of funds raised captured by managers on their fourth fund or later), thus shows up in the United States too. Methodological note: this is proprietary PitchBook data relayed by Fortune, and we found no independent source corroborating it identically at this stage; a counterpoint exists, however, in the measure — global in scope, not US — from Ropes & Gray (Dealmakers Digest, October 2026, based on announced deals tracked by Mergermarket as of 5 October), which puts Q3 2026 sponsor deal value at –3% against Q3 2025 and +26% against Q2 2026, but –59% for September 2026 alone against September 2025: the quarter was thus carried by July and August, and September, at about $90 billion, is the lowest point of the past twelve months (Ropes & Gray calls it the lowest of the thirteen-month window it covers, which includes the past twelve). The Dealmakers Digest gives no rolling twelve-month figure, which would be the most telling indicator.
Sources: Fortune, citing PitchBook (12 Oct 2026); AsiaAsset, citing PitchBook (13 Jul 2026); Ropes & Gray, Dealmakers Digest (October 2026).
📖 Going further: 11. Les fonds de pension et les Universités, piliers du financement du PE (in French)
4. Sustainability in private markets: a 5–7% EBITDA uplift estimated by GPs themselves, and AI governance still in its infancy
The “Sustainability in Private Markets” study published in October 2026 by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) from ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI — a common ESG data framework for private equity managers) data measures portfolio companies’ progress. On a constant sample of 5,490 companies tracked in 2024 and 2025, the share with a decarbonization strategy rises from 27% to 34%, the share with a short-term reduction target from 25% to 33%, and the share with a long-term path aligned to net zero from 12% to 15%. Among buyout companies only, median emissions intensity (emissions relative to a measure of activity) from purchased energy (Scope 2) falls 10.1% between 2024 and 2025, against 1.8% for public companies; for direct emissions (Scope 1), the fall is 4.1% against 0.9%. The public-company data come from the LSEG database.
The most-quoted figure is also the most fragile: surveyed GPs estimate that sustainability initiatives raise portfolio-company EBITDA by 5% to 7% on average over the hold period. This is a self-reported estimate by GPs (EDCI annual member survey, 220 respondents, data as of 22 April 2026), not an audited measurement; the study backs it with isolated examples (a manufacturer that unlocked about $60 million of annual run-rate EBITDA savings) rather than a causal demonstration. The second lesson concerns AI and cybersecurity: 50% of GPs assess AI risks at their portfolio companies (30% plan to) and 46% provide risk-management guidance; companies whose GPs actively monitor these risks show revenue growth 6 points higher — correlation, not causation, as the study implies without saying so outright. On cyber, only 26% of companies run all three critical test types (vulnerability scans, penetration testing, software-development-lifecycle testing), 50% run scans and 48% penetration tests, and 39% reported nothing.
La revue de presse Private Equity, chaque lundi
