ICG Strategic Equity

Intermediate Capital Group (ICG), a London-listed alternative asset manager founded in 1989 and originally focused on mezzanine and private credit, launched its Strategic Equity platform in 2014 to focus exclusively on GP-led secondaries — principally continuation vehicles built around a manager's strongest remaining assets.

Unlike most firms on this list, ICG Strategic Equity does not buy diversified LP fund stakes at all; its entire strategy is structuring and backing continuation funds and other GP-initiated transactions, working directly with fund managers rather than sourcing from LP sellers.

The platform has committed more than $20 billion to some of the largest and most complex GP-led transactions in the market since launch, with a team of 20-plus dedicated investment professionals split between New York and London.

This team works exclusively on GP-led secondaries and continuation vehicles — it does not buy LP stakes in the classic sense. The work is closer to sponsoring a new transaction than to buying an existing position: identifying assets a manager wants to keep, valuing them, and structuring a vehicle that gives existing investors a genuine choice.

The counterparty is the fund manager, and the constituency that must be satisfied is that manager's existing investors. A dedicated GP-led specialist exists because this work needs skills a portfolio buyer does not necessarily have: company-level underwriting, alignment negotiation, and the ability to lead a process where conflicts of interest are structural rather than incidental.

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.