1. Partners Group: anatomy of a performance-fee line
Switzerland’s Partners Group published mixed half-year results on September 1: assets under management up 7% year over year to $186 billion, record H1 fundraising of $16 billion, management fees up 12% in constant currency to CHF 905 million — but performance fees down to CHF 216 million, 19% of total revenues (CHF 1,121 million), against CHF 355 million and 29% in H1 2025: a 39% year-over-year decline. Handle the comparison with care: the group applies IFRS 18 as of 2026 and now aggregates these fees into “performance income”; the restated H1 2025 base is CHF 355 million, versus CHF 314 million as originally reported. The breakdown clarifies the mechanics: 48% of those fees came from private equity, 40% from infrastructure, 11% from private credit; 70% from traditional closed-end programs, 30% from evergreen vehicles. Net profit fell 13% to CHF 502 million. The same release announced a leadership change: Roberto Cagnati and Juri Jenkner, with the firm since 2004, become co-CEOs on January 1, 2027, with David Layton moving to Chief Investment Officer after eight years at the helm.
The paradox is that realizations were stable: $9.4 billion of assets sold in H1 2026, against $8.9 billion a year earlier. The fee drop is a matter of mix and timing — several large direct exits, the kind that crystallize carried interest, were pulled forward into Q4 2025 to capture market momentum, leaving the first half of 2026 bare. The successive targets tell the same story. In March 2025, Partners Group promised that performance fees would represent 25 to 40% of its total revenues in 2026. In March 2026, it expected them in “the lower part of the range.” On September 1, the target was cut to 20-25%, “dependent on the timing of select exits.” The medium-term target (25-40% over 2026-2028) is maintained, resting on realizations expected to ramp toward $20 billion this year, $25 billion in 2027 and $30 billion in 2028. The long series is a reminder that performance fees are structurally volatile: 46% of revenues in 2021, 14% in 2022 — a 78% collapse already blamed on exit timing —, 19% in 2023, 24% in 2024, 32% in 2025.
The watch point remains the evergreens. Their performance fees are computed quarterly on net asset value gains above a high-water mark — that is, without requiring any sale: NAV gains can come from unrealized markups as well as actual disposals — and supplied 30% of the half’s fees. Yet the group disclosed in June redemption requests reaching 9.8% of NAV on its flagship Global Value SICAV in Q2, against quarterly gates of 5%; Bloomberg puts the group’s perpetual vehicles at about $56 billion, close to 30% of assets (Bloomberg, September 1). The market ruled: down 7.1% at the close, as much as 8.6% intraday, roughly 32% year to date. The drop reflects the day’s accumulation of signals: a performance-fee guidance cut for the second time in six months, net profit down 13%, and a leadership reshuffle that investors read against the evergreen redemption backdrop. Swiss analysts stayed measured: for ZKB’s Daniel Regli, the damage is largely in the price; Vontobel’s Andreas Venditti calls the results solid but stresses that the new guidance rests entirely on exit timing (cash.ch/AWP, September 1).
Sources: Partners Group (2026 interim report), Partners Group (results presentation), Bloomberg, cash.ch/AWP.
📖 Going further: The PE Research analyses (in French)
2. Fundraising: Private Equity still raises, in fewer and fewer funds
The awaited report is out: PitchBook published its Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report on September 3. Private markets as a whole raised $658.1 billion in the first half of 2026, on a trajectory pointing to a fifth consecutive annual decline. Private Equity, for its part, rebounded in the second quarter with $165.3 billion in closes, helped by an Asian resurgence that has already topped its full-year 2025 total.
The Private Equity long series (from the Q3 2025 vintage of the same report) shows a contraction in fund count far more than in amounts: 1,508 funds closed for $664.4 billion in 2021, 1,742 for $559.3 billion in 2022, 1,538 for $650.2 billion in 2023, then 938 for $590.7 billion in 2024 — recent counts still being revised upward, as closes get recorded late. Concentration reads through the same pages: the five largest Private Equity funds captured 25% of the asset class’s fundraising in 2025, the highest mark in over a decade, and experienced managers took 86.1% of the total. PitchBook links the persistent pressure on fundraising to the exit backlog: nearly $5 trillion of net asset value, across all private markets, sits in funds aged seven years or more, and net cash flows to LPs are negative for the third consecutive year.
Source: PitchBook.
📖 Going further: The PE Research analyses (in French)
3. Secondaries: a specialists’ market becomes a platform market
Three announcements in one week sketch the new shape of the secondary market. On September 3, CVC closed CVC Secondary Partners VI at $10 billion — nearly double the $5.8 billion of the 2023 vintage, and almost four times the $2.7 billion of 2019 — from more than 200 LPs, about half of them new to the franchise. The window had opened on another structural move: EQT completed on August 31 its acquisition of secondaries specialist Coller Capital ($50 billion in assets), renamed “Coller EQT” — $3.2 billion paid in EQT shares (about 7% of the capital), with an earn-out of up to $500 million. The price buys the management company; Coller’s $50 billion of client assets, for their part, join EQT’s platform, whose total assets now reach €341 billion. Jeremy Coller sees in it the future of the asset class itself: in the long term, he predicts, secondaries will become private equity — that is, buying and selling existing positions, rather than subscribing at launch and waiting for distributions, would become the normal way in and out of the asset class.
What the sequence teaches: a segment dominated yesterday by specialists (Coller, Glendower — now CVC Secondary Partners, Lexington — now part of Franklin Templeton) is passing under the control of large generalist platforms, just as the exit drought makes it the central liquidity channel. And the market is already inventing the next layer: on September 1, new manager Netley Capital announced the final close of its debut “tertiaries” fund — buying stakes in secondaries funds — with about $1.2 billion of commitments for the strategy. One more layer of liquidity, and one more layer of fees, on the same underlying assets.
Sources: CVC (press release), EQT (press release), Netley Capital (press release).
📖 Going further: “What is a continuation fund, and why is it so successful?”
4. Private Equity evergreens: the gates fill up, France opens its own
Semi-liquid Private Equity funds — perpetual vehicles promising retail investors capped quarterly liquidity — are seeing exit requests exceed their gates. The best-documented case is Partners Group, whose June release detailed Q2 redemption requests vehicle by vehicle: 9.8% of NAV on Global Value SICAV, its flagship Private Equity evergreen, about 6% on its US vehicle, and 3.5 to 5% on three other mature funds — against quarterly gates of 5%. The half-year results published this week (section 1) give the accounting translation, and the group itself quantifies the expected effect: one to two percentage points of AuM growth lost in H2 2026, and again in 2027.
At the same moment, retailization is accelerating in France: Peqan, a Paris-based private-markets platform (€250 million in assets), launched on September 4 an evergreen retail fund invested in institutional evergreen vehicles — funds with no wind-up date, open to subscriptions and redemptions on a continuous basis, ordinarily reserved for professional investors —, presented as one of the first of its kind for private clients (CFNEWS). And Les Echos, the French business daily, devoted an investigation this week to the “true returns” of Private Equity for retail investors (Les Echos). The juxtaposition speaks for itself: the products are arriving in France at the precise moment the large Private Equity evergreens are demonstrating, quarter after quarter, the limits of the liquidity promise.
Sources: Partners Group (press release), CFNEWS, Les Echos.
📖 Going further: The PE Research analyses (in French)
5. KKR sells USI to Aon for $17 billion: proof by exit
KKR announced on August 31 the sale of American insurance broker USI Insurance Services to Aon, at a $17 billion enterprise value, all cash, with closing expected in Q4 2026. USI was the first investment of KKR’s core private equity program, dedicated to long holds beyond the four-to-six-year horizon of a classic LBO — USI will have been held nine years. The company was acquired in 2017 at a valuation of about $4.3 billion. The firm says it is realizing about 6 times its original equity, with $3.3 billion of after-tax proceeds; USI’s revenue nearly tripled under its ownership, fueled by more than 90 acquisitions.
The lesson goes beyond the amount. Six times the equity in nine years is a compound rate of roughly 22% per year, gross — doubling the holding period did not dilute the return. The buyer’s identity matters as much as the price: a strategic acquirer, Aon, paying in cash. In the market PitchBook describes — $5 trillion of seven-year-plus assets waiting for liquidity — this week’s successful exits ran through trade sales or post-IPO blocks, like Blackstone’s fully subscribed placement of roughly $1.3 billion in India’s Knowledge Realty Trust, cutting its stake from 46.5% toward 21.5% a year after the REIT’s IPO (Bloomberg, September 1). The IPO route itself remains shut.
Sources: KKR (press release), Bloomberg.
📖 Going further: “VC vs. Buyout in Five Rounds”
6. French venture capital: a rebound carried by ten funds
French venture capital has already done better in six months than in all of 2025: €2.4 billion raised by French VC funds as of June 30, 2026, against €1.7 billion for the whole of 2025 and €1.4 billion in 2024, according to PitchBook‘s Q2 2026 France Market Snapshot (Chart of the Day, September 4). It is the best year since 2023 — while remaining far from that year’s €5.7 billion peak. The detail qualifies the rebound: just ten funds account for those €2.4 billion, against 57 vehicles in 2023 — the global concentration documented by PitchBook (section 2) reads the same way in Paris. In Q2, Kurma Biofund IV, a French life-sciences fund, closed at €215 million, backed by Eurazeo and three cornerstone investors.
The other available sources sketch the same landscape. On the fund side, three of the year’s closes are documented by their managers: daphni blue at €260 million in January (Maddyness), Elaia DeepTech Seed III at €134 million in March (EU-Startups) and Kurma Biofund IV at €215 million in April, up 35% on the prior vintage, with Eurazeo, CSL, the European Investment Fund and Bpifrance among its backers. On the industry-reference side, France Invest — whose H1 2026 study is not expected before the fall — measured in March, with Grant Thornton, €3.4 billion of venture fundraising in France for full-year 2025, up 5% on 2024: the perimeter and methodology differ from PitchBook’s, but the direction is the same. And on the investment side, the July 8 EY barometer counted €4.6 billion raised by French startups in H1 2026, up 65% year over year across 280 deals (-10%) — fewer, larger deals: concentration, there too.
Sources: PitchBook, France Invest, EY, Kurma (press release).
📖 Going further: “VC vs. Buyout in Five Rounds”
References of the week
Partners Group — 2026 Interim Financial Results Report (September 1)
Partners Group — 2026 Interim Financial Results Presentation (September 1)
Partners Group — Update on evergreen fund redemptions (June 4)
cash.ch/AWP — Analysts stick with Partners Group (September 1)
Bloomberg — Partners Group Appoints New Co-CEOs (September 1)
PitchBook — Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report (September 3)
France Invest / Grant Thornton — French private equity activity in 2025 (March 25)
EY — French venture capital barometer, H1 2026 (July 8)
Kurma Partners — Final close of Biofund IV at €215 million (April 24)
Maddyness — daphni blue final close at €260 million (January 29)
EU-Startups — Elaia closes DeepTech Seed III at €134 million (March 12)
CVC — Secondary Partners raises $10 billion for its sixth global secondary fund (September 3)
EQT — EQT closes combination with Coller Capital (August 31)
Netley Capital — Final close of flagship Tertiaries Fund (September 1)
CFNEWS — Peqan launches an evergreen fund of funds (September 4)
Les Echos — Private equity: the true returns for retail investors
KKR — Sale of USI Insurance Services to Aon (August 31)
Bloomberg — Blackstone’s $1.3 billion India REIT sale fully subscribed (September 1)
