1. CalPERS: 19.4% of the fund in Private Equity — America’s largest LP owns its overallocation
The investment committee of CalPERS, the California public employees’ pension fund and the largest in the United States, reviewed its Private Equity portfolio as of June 30, 2026 on September 14, in a report prepared by Meketa Investment Group, the US institutional investment consulting firm (founded in 1978, Massachusetts) that has advised the CalPERS board on Private Equity since 2017. The snapshot: $123.6 billion of net assets in PE (up $17.4 billion in a year), or 19.4% of the total fund — against a long-term target of 17%. Net performance tells a two-part story: 17.0% over one year versus 22.4% for the benchmark — a global public equity index, the FTSE Global All Cap ex-Tobacco, plus 150 basis points, lagged one quarter — a 5.4-point shortfall that reflects private valuations trailing a rallying stock market, 14.0% versus 18.5% over three years, but 11.9% versus 11.1% over five years and 13.1% over ten — above the median of US public pension funds over every period. The strategy mix is telling: buyout accounts for just 53.9% of the portfolio against a 65% target, while growth (33.1% versus 25%) and venture (8.5% versus 6%) are overweight; and the gap also runs across investment channels: over one year, customized separate accounts — vehicles run by a single GP exclusively for CalPERS, on negotiated terms — returned 23.3%, while co-investments made directly alongside funds returned just 11.4%. CalPERS draws no restrictive conclusion from it: the report measures that co-investments (8.4% of NAV, $10.3 billion) beat the whole portfolio over time — 14.6% over three years, 12.7% over five and 14.1% over ten, against 14.0%, 11.9% and 13.1% for the total PE portfolio: only the past year breaks the pattern — stresses the growing weight of no- and low-fee vehicles, and the program keeps expanding — including a wider range of co-investment sources — with no explanation offered for the year’s underperformance.
The move that matters is elsewhere: far from braking, CalPERS committed $26.1 billion of new capital to PE over the trailing twelve months, and its Total Portfolio Approach — the new management framework adopted by the CalPERS board itself, which runs the fund as a single whole rather than by asset-class buckets, and which Meketa’s review merely records — removed strategy-level allocation limits altogether when it took effect on July 1 (“strategy limits have been eliminated,” Meketa writes). There is thus no longer any binding cap on amounts per strategy: the targets (65% buyout, 25% growth, 6% venture) survive as indicative references, control shifts to total-portfolio risk — and the report describes no replacement framework, with Meketa merely announcing that it will report on PE “in the context of its role within the TPA” from coming quarters. In short: CalPERS holds more Private Equity than its own target calls for, its one-year performance trails its benchmark — and it is raising its commitments anyway. Coming from America’s largest public pension fund, that choice will set a reference point, whether other LPs read it as an example to follow or an excess to avoid.
Sources: CalPERS (Private Equity Trust Level Review, Meketa), CalPERS (September 14 committee).
📖 Going further: “Pension funds and universities, the pillars of Private Equity funding” (in French)
2. PitchBook’s fundraising report: $468.8 billion raised by Private Equity over twelve months — concentration becomes the permanent regime, and new managers can no longer find capital
PitchBook’s Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report (data as of June 30, 2026) delivers the snapshot of Private Equity fundraising. The second quarter marked a rebound: $165.3 billion of fund closings lifted the trailing-12-month total to $468.8 billion (from $417 billion a quarter earlier) — but the trend remains negative: that trailing-12-month total is down 12.1% from the twelve months before, with fund count collapsing 35.5% to 862. Concentration has become the permanent regime: since 2024, 77% of PE capital raised has gone to funds above $1 billion, against 63.6% over 2014-2016 — LPs are consolidating their relationships, and the middle market is struggling to elbow its way into new allocations, even as PitchBook’s own Q2 2026 US PE Middle Market Report (September 14) credits it with “a persistent performance edge over megafunds.” The appetite is there when the format fits: Siguler Guff closed a record $3 billion small-buyout program on September 18 — a segment where companies carry 2–3x EBITDA of debt versus 5–6x in large buyouts, and where entry multiples (8.5x for $25–100 million targets in Q1) sit far below the 13.2x of the upper middle market. Asia is the one reversal: $48.3 billion raised in the first half, more than in all of 2025, driven by three mega-closes of pan-Asian vehicles (Baring Asia IX, now under the EQT flag, at $15.6 billion, Blackstone Capital Partners Asia III at $13.1 billion, Bain Capital Asia VI at $10.5 billion). The geography of the rebound deserves precision: PitchBook describes it as the exit from a near-decade of retreat that followed many firms’ withdrawal from the Chinese market — it is Asia-ex-China strategies, aimed at Japan, India, Australia and Southeast Asia, that are raising, not a return of Beijing.
Cross-checking against other data providers validates the trend — not the figure to the dollar. Preqin counts $191 billion of PE fund closings in the second quarter (Quarterly Update of July 31), about 15% above PitchBook — a routine gap between methodologies (closing-date attribution, treatment of secondaries, coverage universe). On the trajectory, the sources converge: S&P Global Market Intelligence measured a decline of 11% in 2025 ($490.8 billion), McKinsey one of 17% ($616 billion, on a broader perimeter), and the concentration shows up everywhere — 35% of capital to funds above $5 billion at McKinsey, the top 20 funds at about 55% of the half-year’s haul at With Intelligence. The apparent discord comes from PEI, which in July hailed the “best second quarter on record” (about $327 billion): its perimeter aggregates VC and secondaries, and above all Abu Dhabi’s $49 billion MGX fund — the sovereign outlier that distorts the series. A useful reminder: in fundraising, the perimeter makes the number.
Two numbers in the report frame the real story. First, the door is closing on newcomers: only 36 first-time funds closed in the first half, raising $7.7 billion — against 312 funds and $39.8 billion in 2021. The new blood is retail: US evergreen PE assets nearly doubled in five quarters, from $51.3 billion in Q4 2024 to $99.3 billion in Q1 2026 — capital that also flows to the largest GPs. The plumbing is being laid: Great Gray Trust ($371.8 billion in fiduciary assets) picked the iCapital platform on September 14 to build collective investment trusts bringing PE into American 401(k) plans — the employer-sponsored defined-contribution retirement accounts through which US employees invest their salary deferrals — a $13.8 trillion market. Second, PE’s leverage feeds its neighbor: the only strategy in the report still growing its intake is private debt, and a study published September 17 by Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge explains why, in Victoria Ivashina’s words: if private debt now weighs $2 trillion, “the reason behind the growth of private debt is the increasing allocation to private equity” — LBO debt, particularly in the middle market, built the asset class. The share can be measured: per PitchBook LCD data, about 60% of US direct lending (57.9% in Q1 2026) still finances PE-sponsored companies — the proportion topped 80% coming out of the pandemic, and its decline owes less to lender diversification than to the lack of sponsor activity. PE has stopped distributing, but it still makes others raise.
The sector counterpoint is brutal: PitchBook’s 2026 Climate Tech Funds Report (September 11) measures the collapse of an entire vertical — $3.9 billion raised in 2025 (down 39.7%), and just $546 million across 6 funds as of August 18, 2026, against $10.5 billion and 85 funds at the 2021 peak. Two European funds (Denmark’s Kompas II and the UK’s 2150 Urban Tech Sustainability Fund II) account for 79% of this year’s haul. When the tide goes out, theses without DPI are left stranded.
Sources: PitchBook (Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report), HBS Working Knowledge (Victoria Ivashina), PitchBook (2026 Climate Tech Funds Report), iCapital (press release).
📖 Going further: “Private Equity: An Asset Class Come of Age”
3. The mega-LBO is back — at the precise moment the Fed raises rates
A sight not seen since 2021: two mega-fund consortia openly competing. According to Private Equity Wire (citing Bloomberg, September 18), Blackstone, KKR and Energy Capital Partners on one side, Brookfield and IFM on the other, are vying for the take-private of Canada’s GFL Environmental — roughly $29 billion of enterprise value ($19 billion of equity, $10 billion of debt), potentially the year’s largest LBO; founder Patrick Dovigi would roll his entire stake. In parallel, Apollo entered exclusive talks for DePuy Synthes, Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedics division, at around $20 billion ($9.3 billion of 2025 revenue) — the return of the very large corporate carve-out. Further down the spectrum, Brookfield signed the $2.8 billion take-private of Australia’s Reliance Worldwide on September 15, and Clearlake bought out Todd Boehly’s and Mark Walter’s 25.6% of Chelsea FC on September 17 for £950 million — valuing the club at £5 billion including debt, in a European football landscape where more than 36% of clubs in the five major leagues already have a private-markets shareholder.
The irony of the calendar: this surge in appetite came the very week the Federal Reserve raised rates by 25 basis points (to a 3.75%–4% range), the first hike since 2023. PitchBook calls the move “directionally negative” for a US PE industry whose acquisition debt is mostly floating-rate — and whose exits remain clogged: $102.6 billion of exit value in Q2 — down 46.3% from Q1 2026, and 7.4% from Q2 2025 —, a median holding period for portfolio companies of 4.5 years at the end of June 2026 — the longest in roughly two decades per PitchBook, up from 3.4 years at the end of 2024, itself already a nine-year high, and middle-market entry multiples below 10x EV/EBITDA for the first time in seven years. Buying big just as the cost of leverage rises and the exit door narrows: the 2026 vintages will have to prove the case.
Sources: Private Equity Wire (GFL), Private Equity Wire (DePuy Synthes), Brookfield (press release), PitchBook (Chelsea), PitchBook (Fed).
📖 Going further: “The LBO Asymmetry”
4. Secondaries: six buyers for ITP Aero’s continuation fund — and a market that admits its “bad practices”
The continuation-fund market is running at full throttle, and aerospace and defense is its premium fuel: according to Secondaries Investor (September 16), six buyers — including CVC, Goldman Sachs AM, LGT and Warburg Pincus — are competing for the $2.5 billion continuation vehicle Bain Capital is assembling for ITP Aero, the Spanish aero-engine maker it bought from Rolls-Royce in 2022 for about €1.7 billion. An oversubscribed continuation fund is now worth more than a sale to a strategic buyer. Scandinavia’s Klar Partners launched its own CV for Nimlas (Nordic technical services) on September 18.
The critical eye came, for once, from inside. At the IPEM conference in Paris, as reported by Secondaries Investor (September 17), market advisers publicly acknowledged that “bad practices exist” in some continuation funds. Demand, meanwhile, is not flagging: the same outlet observes that investors who have already backed a continuation fund come back to back more. The paradox in plain terms: in a continuation fund, the GP is both seller and buyer of the same asset; the market keeps growing while itself admitting that the policing of these conflicts of interest remains unfinished.
Sources: Secondaries Investor (ITP Aero), Secondaries Investor (IPEM), Secondaries Investor (Klar/Nimlas).
📖 Going further: “What is a Continuation Fund?”
5. Corporate venture: when the industrials man the venture capital counter
Bpifrance, the French state investment bank, closed InnoBio 3 at €207 million on September 17, with Sanofi, Servier, Ipsen, Bristol Myers Squibb and the Institut Pasteur among the subscribers — 12 to 14 biotechs targeted, initial tickets of €6–8 million, five investments already made. Where traditional institutions have deserted early-stage healthcare, corporate pharma venture remains the backbone of French biotech financing — the InnoBio franchise claims 37 biotechs backed since 2009 and 17 liquidity events, including Amolyt (sold to AstraZeneca for $1.05 billion).
The movement reaches beyond France and beyond the fund format: industrial companies also invest directly in growth rounds. On September 17, America’s Crusoe (AI infrastructure “from electrons to tokens”) closed a $3.9 billion Series F at a $30.9 billion valuation, with TPG as a significant investor — and NVIDIA in the round, alongside sovereign funds Mubadala, GIC and QIA. After Samsung led the Mistral round last week, the pattern holds: in the segments that traditional institutional LPs no longer suffice to finance — early-stage healthcare as much as AI infrastructure — it is the industrials who man the counter, as LPs in funds or directly in rounds. Venture capital gains deep pockets, and shareholders whose agenda is not purely financial.
Sources: Bpifrance (press release), TPG (Crusoe press release).
📖 Going further: “VC vs. Buyout in Five Rounds”
6. Successions, behind the scenes: at TPG, the boss’s retention bonus drove the heir apparent away
Last week’s edition told the story of CVC’s settled succession and its hiring of Todd Sisitsky, TPG’s President. This week brought the other half: Bloomberg revealed on September 18 why the heir apparent left. Jon Winkelried, 66, TPG’s chief executive, has no intention of stepping aside: his contract runs through the end of 2027 and then renews annually, and his late-2023 stock awards — potentially worth more than $450 million if the share price reaches $70 by January 2030, topped by a $25 million retention grant vesting in 2031 — pay him to stay. Sisitsky, 54, tired of waiting for a handover with no horizon, resigned (TPG’s 8-K filing with the SEC sets the effective date at September 6) and will become co-CEO of CVC in early 2028. The mechanism deserves to be stated plainly: the mega retention packages of listed GPs, designed to reassure shareholders about management stability, have become the single biggest obstacle to succession — and a recruiting windfall for competitors who have settled theirs.
Sources: Bloomberg, SEC (TPG 8-K).
📖 Going further: “The Consolidation of Private Equity Players”
References of the week
PitchBook — Q2 2026 Global Private Market Fundraising Report (data as of June 30, 2026)
Preqin — Private Equity Q2 2026 Quarterly Update (July 31)
McKinsey — Global Private Markets Report 2026 (Private Equity chapter) (February 10)
PEI — H1 2026 Fundraising Report (July 9)
PitchBook — 2026 Climate Tech Funds Report (September 11)
HBS Working Knowledge — How private debt became a $2 trillion industry (Victoria Ivashina) (September 17)
iCapital / Great Gray Trust — Private markets in 401(k) plans (September 14)
CalPERS / Meketa — Private Equity Trust Level Review as of June 30, 2026 (September 14 committee)
Bloomberg — TPG: Jon Winkelried’s retention bonus (September 18)
SEC — TPG 8-K (Todd Sisitsky’s resignation) (effective September 6)
Private Equity Wire — GFL: rival consortia (September 18)
Private Equity Wire — Apollo / DePuy Synthes (September 14)
Brookfield — Reliance Worldwide take-private (September 15)
PitchBook — Clearlake / Chelsea FC (September 17)
PitchBook — The Fed hike and US PE (September 16)
Secondaries Investor — Six buyers on Bain’s ITP Aero CV (September 16)
Secondaries Investor — “Bad practices exist in some CVs” (IPEM) (September 17)
Bpifrance — InnoBio 3 final close at €207 million (September 17)
TPG — Crusoe raises $3.9 billion Series F (NVIDIA, Mubadala, GIC, QIA in the round) (September 17)
Gilles Mougenot — Senior Advisor at Argos Fund, former Chairman of France Invest
La revue de presse Private Equity, chaque lundi
