Private markets thawing — $2.5bn CV
Secondaries and continuation vehicles are showing renewed activity: Arcmont Asset Management closed an oversubscribed $2.5bn credit continuation vehicle led by Ares Credit Secondaries, a sign sophisticated investors are redeploying capital into existing private assets. That improves overall private-market liquidity but mainly benefits later-stage or proven assets, not seed-stage founders without clear durability signals. (alternativecreditinvestor.com)
A private credit manager just sold a portfolio to itself, raised $2.5 billion around it, and still called it a liquidity event. Arcmont Asset Management said on April 10 that it closed an oversubscribed continuation vehicle led by Ares Credit Secondaries, and both firms described it as one of the largest European credit secondaries deals to date. (aresmgmt.com) The assets were not startups or speculative bets. Arcmont said the vehicle holds first-lien senior secured loans from its 2019 Direct Lending Fund III, which means loans that sit at the front of the repayment line and are backed by borrower collateral. (arcmont.com) A continuation vehicle is a new pool of money built to buy assets out of an older fund. Existing investors can usually cash out, roll into the new vehicle, or do a mix of both, while the manager keeps running the same assets for a longer period. (whitecase.com) That structure has become popular because the normal exits have been jammed. When mergers, initial public offerings, and refinancing markets slow down, private fund managers still need a way to return cash to investors without dumping assets at bad prices. (caia.org) The secondaries market is now big enough to absorb that pressure. Evercore said total private capital secondary volume hit $226 billion in 2025, with general partner-led deals at $106 billion, which shows how much managers are now using engineered liquidity instead of traditional sales. (evercore.com) Credit has been one of the fastest-growing corners of that market. Evercore said global credit secondary volume rose from about $6 billion in 2023 to about $11 billion in 2024 and was expected to exceed $18 billion in 2025, with manager-led deals becoming the majority of activity. (evercore.com) The buyer base has grown too. Jefferies said dedicated secondaries dry powder reached $302 billion in the first half of 2025, and the average continuation vehicle got larger as new investors and evergreen funds pushed more money into the strategy. (jefferies.com) That is why Arcmont could raise so much against existing loans instead of new ones. Investors were not underwriting a fresh lending spree; they were paying for a seasoned portfolio with several years of payment history, documentation, and manager knowledge already in place. (arcmont.com) The catch is that this kind of thaw helps the safest parts of private markets first. A first-lien loan book from a 2019 fund is easier to finance than a seed-stage software company, because one comes with collateral and cash flows and the other comes with a pitch deck and a burn rate. (arcmont.com) So the signal from this deal is not that all private assets are liquid again. The signal is that large buyers are reopening the market for proven assets with durable income, while the hardest-to-price corners of venture and growth capital still need a real exit market, not just a clever wrapper. (lazard.com)
