Who are the top MM PE funds

There are a ton of great upper MM shops, but the ones that immediately come to mind are:

• Berkshire
• American Securities
• TH Lee
• Leonard Green
• CD&R
• GTCR
• Onex
• Madison Dearborn
• H&F
• Silver Lake
• Francisco Partners
• Lindsay Goldberg
• HIG Capital
• Golden Gate
• First Reserve

Again, I'm probably leaving a few out, but these are the major ones that seem to pop up most frequently.

H&f's last three funds were 8 9 and 10bn. KKR's last fund is 13bn Silver Lake was also 10bn.

In what world are h&f and Silver Lake "middle market?" They all bid on the same companies.

Leonard Green was 10bn too CD-R 7 I think.

Excellere and Harvest Partners were both able to raise their carry to >25% on their last funds. I'd qualify the ability to do better than 2/20 as top MM funds.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-13/top-performing-buyou…

The definition of middle market is a bit nebulous in PE, whereas in banking it's pretty well defined. Depends how you define AUM (total active funds vs total funds), etc. I saw a thread where this was debated..but on mobile so can't find it

Would also mention funds like: Advent, Apax Partners, BC Partners, Court Square, Genstar, New Mountain, Thoma Bravo, Vista

This is a pretty dumb question because there are so many good non-MF funds and so many ways to answer this. What do you mean by top? Biggest MM fund? Best performance? Best compensation? Best hours? Best quality of life? Most prestige? Best exit opps to business school? Best opportunity to get promoted directly?

Advent??? Their last fund was as big as KKRs and 2x Bain's and 1bn bigger than Warburg. Granted both Advent and WP look at mm deals a lot.

What in the world is going on in this thread

Since people are giving a lot of examples of MM PE, let me tell you what is NOT MM PE.

Guys like Advent, H&F, CVC, Silver Lake, First Reserve are NOT MM. I don't understand why people think this - just because they are not your "traditional megafunds" like KKR/BX/Carlyle/Apollo/Warburg/Bain? "Middle Market" is NOT a catch-all term for anything that isn't one of those 6 buyout shops. Call them megafunds, pseudo-megafunds, specialized megafunds, foreign megafunds or whatever you want, but they are not considered MM by the majority of people in the field.

MM typically means MM buyout, which also means even guys like GA and Summit don't fall into the traditional MM categorization either.

Riverside

Let's just settle on a fund size number under 1B. Once you get over a billion dollar raise you get to the point where fundraising is now tied more to brand recognition than pure performance.

L Catterton