France-based investment firm Ardian has raised US$30 billion for its latest secondaries platform, with Asia-based investors chipping in just over a fifth of this amount.
The amount raised via this ninth-generation fund platform beats the earlier round of US$19 billion in 2020, and brings Ardian's secondaries and primaries assets under management to US$97 billion.
In private equity, secondaries transactions give investors the chance to offload their earlier investments as another exit option. The buyers, presumably, are going in at a more updated risk-adjusted level with better assurance for their own eventual upside.
Ardian, led by Dominique Senequier, can trace its roots to 1996 as the private equity unit of insurer AXA which was launched with a US$100 million buyout fund.
She led a management buyout in 2013 and the business was rebranded as Ardian, whose AUM had shot up to US$36 billion by then.
“We are actively capitalizing on a generational buying opportunity for secondaries," says Mark Benedetti, executive vice president and co-head of secondaries at Ardian.
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He notes that with private markets continuing with "exponential" growth, investors increasingly look to secondary buyers to help them actively manage their private equity portfolios.
"And more recently, with a changing interest rate environment and public market volatility, many find themselves overallocated and in need of a solution," says Benedetti.
Vladimir Colas, executive vice president and co-head of secondaries at Ardian, observes that the past 12 months marked a record-breaking year for secondaries volume.
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"Using the secondary market for liquidity and portfolio rebalancing is no longer a one-off decision but now an integral part of institutional investors' private markets investment strategies," he says.
Colas adds that the ninth fund is already 50% deployed and Ardian expects this year to be an even stronger year of activity.
He told the Financial Times that the volume of secondaries would reach a record of US$150 billion for 2024. No thanks to lower liquidity for investors, Colas estimates that in the last two years, around half of the sellers into secondaries were first time sellers.
