Data on PE Firms With Growing Momentum
There’s been a lot of discussion on this forum about MM PE funds that have struggled to raise recently and are increasingly viewed as risky places to join, names like AmSec, Siris, Onex, and Providence get cited frequently due to clear declines in fundraising momentum. At the same time, there’s a prevailing view here that for someone who wants to be a career PE investor, the best seats tend to be at growing UMM platforms.
Obviously this is hard to predict ex ante, but I was curious which firms have actually demonstrated momentum by raising meaningfully larger funds in a tough environment. Using 2024 as a reference point (given most funds are on ~2–3 year cycles), below are PE / GE platforms that raised funds in the ~$3–10bn range and saw >$1bn of size increase versus their prior vehicle. This is based on a basic pitchbook scan with all numbers in $bn's:
- Summit: 8.3 → 9.5
- Berkshire: 5.8 → 7.8
- Great Hill: 4.6 → 7.0
- TJC: 5.0 → 6.9
- Arcline: 4.5 → 6.0
- Arlington: 3.8 → 6.0
- PSG: 4.5 → 6.0
- ICONIQ: 2.6 → 5.75
- Linden: 3.0 → 5.4
- Lindsay Goldberg: 3.4 → 4.9
- Haveli: 0 → 4.5
- Nautic: 3.0 → 4.5
- Arctos: 3.0 → 4.1 (now KKR-backed)
- Ridgemont: 2.4 → 3.9
- LLCP: 2.5 → 3.6
- Wynnchurch: 2.3 → 3.5
- FTV: 2.4 → 3.4
- Cortec: 2.0 → 3.2
That's almost 20 MM PE / GE shops that have increased fund size by a noticeable ammount in rough fundraising times. Can also add in 26North whenever it closes it's first fund given it has already raised ~4.3bn per public reports.
I’m not deeply familiar with every name here, but LPs are clearly allocating to these platforms, and they’re likely the ones with the best odds of continued scaling. Would love to get people's thoughts here.
Names that stood out to me based on these numbers are Great Hill, Arlington, Linden, ICONIQ, and TJC. As I don't think those funds are often mentioned in the really fast growing category as other funds like Arcline.
For every NMC, there are multiple AmSecs. Nobody can predict the future, PE is a returns business and momentum can flip faster than people think.
AmSec is a perfect example: they went 2.3 → 3.6 → 5 → 7, then back down to 2.7. If you joined during the run-up and managed to stick around for it, that was an incredible seat and you had a right-tail outcome in terms of promotions / carry for PE as a whole and relative to MF PE. But figuring out who will actually sustain that kind of scale is the hard part, and you usually only know in hindsight.
Fund trajectories are massively path dependent and driven by performance that takes years to play out. Way easier to identify the winners after the fact than before. It’s great to be the associate who joined two years ago and rode the scale into better promotion odds, or the SA who now has carry and a VP title. The problem is you never know if that dynamic will still be there two years from now. Would really think about balancing the risk-reward of it all and coming to an answer based on personal risk-tolerance on whether to pursue MM/UMM vs. MF PE.
Would also add
— HIG LBO and MM
— OneRock
— Morgan Stanley Capital Partners
Thank you for adding more names! Unsure how missed in the pitchbook scan, but appreciate the names. Seems like a decent number of names that are still growing in that 3-10bn fund size.
Is HIG MM different from their technologies team?
There’s no more technology team. The core buyout funds are MM / LBO / ADV, with MM / LBO being the core original strategy
Bump
26north is a new first time fund so who knows where that ends up
They’ve publicly disclosed ~$4.3bn raised so far. Hard to know where it ultimately lands since they’ve been in market for a while.
Even if it closes around at number, it would still rank as the second-largest first-time fund ever behind only Haveli, which seems pretty impressive on paper at least, which is why I made sure to call them out in the bottom of the post.
A lot of it is probably friends and family of Josh Harris. I’ve heard mixed things about 26Norths PE arm so far - seems a bit scattered and doesn’t really have a cohesive strategy. We will see how track record plays out - that’s what matters to survive in this industry
As an LP giving $ to a guy who has already made billions and has no real driver left is a bad play IMO. Would much rather give it to a 40 year old who bounced from a great firm and is hungry.
How do you reconcile that view with the fundraising success of firms like Haveli and 26North? Both are led by former megafund co-founders who’ve already generated significant personal wealth, yet LP demand was clearly strong based on their fund sizes. Just trying to figure out what are some good growing MM/UMM names to target for recruiting, and would love to hear from someone on the LP side how they'd think about that question.
Any thoughts on Patient Square or Vistria?
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