$108 billion in GP-led continuation funds in 2025 — up from $77 billion the year before. That's forty percent in one year, and nobody's answering whether the fairness checks kept up. This is Infrastructure Secondaries Daily. Today — a Coller number that finally lets us test whether those record headlines are even counting the same market. And who actually signs off that the price is fair when the manager's on both sides of the table. Let's get into it. So here's the figure I can finally stand on. Coller, from Paul Lanna, dated May 2026 — $108 billion in GP-led continuation funds for 2025. We're talking GP-led specifically, rather than total secondaries. Which is the part I care about — because Jefferies put the GP-led slice around $47 billion. Both can't be the whole picture. They're not even measuring the same universe. Lanna's framing is telling, too. He calls it the place a 'scaled buyer finds its edge.' That's a buyer's sentence. When a buyer is sitting on $108 billion of deal flow, it sets the price for every LP electing to cash out. Right — that clip answers the buyer's question and leaves the seller's untouched. Why couldn't this GP wait for the next vintage, and who checked the price before the election deadline? And that's where the volume bites. ILPA wrote its GP-led guidance in 2019 — fairness opinions, LPAC engagement — when the market was a fraction of today's size. A 40% jump in one year asks that machinery to process a lot more, fast. At that pace, a one-day slip in getting the fairness opinion to LPAC members isn't just a one-off. Spread across hundreds of these vehicles, you have to assume it's built into the process. And nobody's reported whether it held up. We have the scale now — sourced, dated. What we don't have is anyone auditing whether the governance kept up with it. The Coller-versus-Jefferies gap shows the counting is inconsistent right at the definition. And every fairness standard, every disclosure rule, gets built on top of a number people can't agree on. Great foundation. Scaled buyer, scaled flow, and a $61 billion definitional gap underneath the whole thing. We'll be on it tomorrow. Here's Paul Lanna at Coller Capital:
2025 was another record-breaking year for GPLEDs, uh, specifically continuation funds. There was $108 billion of transaction value in the market. That was up significantly from 2024, which was $77 billion. And if you go all the way back to 2015, it was only an $8 billion market. So, we've seen tremendous growth. GPLEDs are the fastest growing part of the secondaries market.
Here's the number I've been waiting all week to put a date and a name on: Coller's Paul Lanna says GP-led continuation funds hit $108 billion in 2025, up from $77 billion in 2024. That's a 40% jump in a single year — and it's GP-led specifically, rather than the total secondaries headline everyone keeps blurring together. And it's a single-source, GP-led-only figure — which is exactly what we've been missing. Jefferies put their GP-led slice at $47 billion. Coller says $108 billion. Both can't be measuring the same universe. Lanna frames it as where a scaled buyer 'finds its edge.' Sure — a buyer sitting on $108 billion of deal flow can walk away from any single asset. The LP electing to cash out can't walk away from much. That's the pricing power. Right, and his pitch is that the GP rolls their own dollars in alongside, so they must believe in the asset. That's a buyer's comfort story. It doesn't tell the pensioner whether anyone independent checked the price they're rolling at. When a GP runs a continuation vehicle, they're basically setting the price on assets they want to keep. So who's actually in the room making sure that number is fair? And what stops this from becoming the manager grading their own homework? It's a genuinely thorny setup. Short answer: there are several layers of oversight, but none of them is airtight. The conflict is structural — the GP is the seller, the manager for the buyer, and the party setting the carry reset. That's why a CFA Institute report published in September 2025 flags continuation funds as presenting 'heightened conflicts of interest' relative to standard fund transactions. The main check the market has settled on is the independent fairness opinion, usually from a third-party financial adviser. It's supposed to give existing LPs an objective read on whether the transfer price reflects fair value. Per Goodwin's March 2026 analysis of real estate continuation vehicles, that fairness opinion has moved from optional to near-standard governance. Then there's the LP Advisory Committee — the LPAC — which reviews the deal and either approves it or, in many cases, simply does not object under a no-action threshold. Legally, that's different from an affirmative sign-off. And on the incoming side, you have the secondary buyer. Skadden noted in April 2026 that continuation vehicles now account for around fourteen percent of all private equity exits, so sophisticated buyers are pricing these deals in a competitive process. That gives you some market validation of the asset value — but that buyer is negotiating to win, not to protect existing LPs. If the incoming secondary buyer is negotiating hard to win the deal, doesn't that mean their price signal could actually be optimistic rather than a neutral check on the GP? That's the tension regulators and practitioners are watching. Skadden specifically flagged that the combination of conflict exposure and rapid volume growth 'seems likely to lead to disputes and greater regulatory scrutiny.' A PitchBook piece from January 2026 added another wrinkle: when a fund-of-funds manager is both an LP in the old fund and a potential secondary buyer in the new one, the sales process, in their words, 'needs to be squeaky clean' — and in many cases, it's not. So if you're an LP, watch where the fairness opinion comes from. Does the adviser have no placement fee riding on the deal closing? And is the LPAC vote a real approval, or just a failure to object? If Infrastructure Secondaries Daily is part of your routine, consider subscribing and leaving a quick review wherever you're listening. It helps other people find the show, and it helps us keep making each briefing useful.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one deserves a closer look, it's all there for you. Thanks for listening.
That's Infrastructure Secondaries Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.