Frontier AI’s entry fee: How much does it cost to build and run a frontier AI lab, and how much of that bill falls to investors rather than customers? Our analyst note lays out the numbers. Get it here.
Private market returns: Our Private Capital Indexes track returns across active, closed-end funds, drawing on data representing $4.6 trillion in net asset value. View the Q2 report here.
Tune in: Join us Wednesday for our quarterly Venture Monitor webinar. Register here.
ICYMI: Anxiety is once again spiking over debt held by AI infrastructure companies. Our report from last week lays out the economics of nine major players. Download it here.
Continuation-fund-related exits have grown from under 1% of global PE exit value to a peak of 7.3% in 2025, reflecting their growing role in the PE playbook. They have evolved from a niche cleanup tool for offloading distressed assets into a strategic option for retaining trophy assets with further upside. As that shift normalizes, three trends reveal how the liquidity tool is being used differently.
1. Assets are entering younger. Although continuation funds were originally intended for assets nearing the end of their lifespans, close to 80% of assets in continuation funds have entered them within seven years of the initial investment. GPs are increasingly deploying continuation funds proactively, on high-conviction winners, rather than turning to them only under the pressure of aging assets.
2. Software distress is reshaping the sector mix. IT’s share of continuation fund activity climbed between 2023 and 2025, with this trend visible in single-asset continuation funds in particular: IT single-asset funds doubled from five in 2023 to 10 in 2025, while value jumped from $1.9 billion to $7.3 billion.
The sector’s share remains elevated so far in 2026. Sponsors that bought software assets at peak multiples are reluctant to sell at today’s adjusted marks, and AI-disruption concerns have further compressed valuations and narrowed exit options. The current disruption gives GPs reason to buy additional time to reposition companies rather than sell into a wary market.
3. “CV-squared” is extending the timeline once again. Rolling a company into a second continuation fund gained traction in 2025, with six tracked transactions during the year, compared with just one in 2024. Two more have occurred in 2026.
These trends together reflect a preference to retain rather than exit, driven by genuine conviction in their strongest assets or a reluctance to sell into a weak market. CV-squared transactions will be a clear stress test of whether continuation funds are a durable and successful liquidity tool or a mechanism for deferring exits indefinitely.
European take-privates are having their second-strongest year on record, but 2026 looks nothing like the year it most closely resembles.
In 2022, rate-driven repricing pushed sponsors into public markets opportunistically, snapping up bull-market IPO darlings whose share prices had collapsed as rates rose.
This year, public markets have been rising, but take-private deal value is coming within striking distance of the all-time record regardless.
That gap comes down to two structural forces rather than a one-off repricing. First, Europe’s largest funds have grown more than 50%, and the check sizes needed to deploy that capital have grown with them. Second, Europe’s public markets have simply become less attractive for listing in the first place, with IPO activity down more than 80% from its 2021 peak and the pool of listed companies shrinking every year since then.
The UK sits at the center of it all, accounting for nearly 60% of the year’s take-private value, reflecting a London Stock Exchange that is losing companies faster than it replaces them, with delistings outpacing new listings and pension funds continuing to pull back from UK equities.
So what does all this mean for the people on either side of these deals?
For GPs and LPs, the toolkit has genuinely expanded: Sponsors can now shop for assets across public and private markets interchangeably, with take-privates historically pricing at a discount to private deals. But that also means LPs need sharper scrutiny of whether a manager can actually execute at this new, larger scale, not just whether it has done take-privates before.
For boards, the lesson is to stop reading a sponsor’s approach as a sign of distress. Several of this year’s targets were performing well by any operational measure; it was the cost and constraints of being listed, not performance, that made going private the more attractive option.
OpenAI reported that its annualized revenue (run rate) at the end of September was about $50 billion, not $70 billion as estimated by investors.
A day after that correction, it was reported that OpenAI expects to reach $70 billion in annualized revenue by year-end.
This note explores what these new numbers say about the company’s business quality, and shows how the year-end target assumes that growth slows by about half. It also puts the company’s valuation near $1 trillion, below the reported $1.43 trillion, and tests the reported valuation against OpenAI’s own 2030 plan.
Oct. 21 | Insights on Korea’s private markets. At ASK Singapore, PitchBook analyst Melanie Tng will speak about how Korea’s private markets have evolved, where capital is being deployed, key trends, the exit environment, and the next areas of growth.
