AlpInvest Partners

AlpInvest was created around 1999-2000 as the joint private equity investment platform for Dutch pension funds APG and PGGM, managing a large primary fund-of-funds and co-investment program on their behalf before launching a dedicated secondaries strategy in 2002.

The Carlyle Group acquired a 60% majority stake in AlpInvest in 2011, bringing the firm into Carlyle's global investment solutions platform (branded Carlyle AlpInvest) while AlpInvest continued managing capital for its original pension-fund clients alongside new third-party investors.

AlpInvest's secondaries business has grown into one of the largest buyers of private equity fund stakes and GP-led continuation vehicle positions in the market, with successive secondaries programs each raising several billion dollars.

AlpInvest buys LP stakes and backs GP-led deals, alongside co-investment and primary fund programmes. Its origin as the private-markets manager for two large Dutch pension investors is part of why the firm operates at institutional portfolio scale — the business was built to deploy pension capital across private markets before it became a third-party manager.

Pension plans, insurers and sovereign investors sit on the other side of most of its secondary transactions. That is a useful reminder of who actually owns private equity: the ultimate beneficiaries of most of the capital in this market are retirement savers, which is also why liquidity and valuation practices in private markets attract regulatory attention.

Secondaries desks and franchises that operate inside a larger private-markets manager, usually built by acquiring an independent specialist and folding it into a broader platform.

This site groups buyers into four categories, because the category tells you more about how a firm behaves than its size does. See the rest of theplatform within a diversified managergroup in the directory.