Why GP-led deals have grown faster than LP-led ones

For most of the secondary market's history since Coller Capital pioneered it in 1990, the dominant transaction type was straightforward: an LP sells its fund stake to another investor. In recent years, GP-led transactions — continuation funds, strip sales, and other manager-initiated structures — have grown as a share of total volume, in many years outpacing growth in traditionalLP-led secondaries. The reasons say as much about fund manager incentives as about market demand.

GPs control the timing, LPs don't

An LP-led sale happens whenever an individual LP decides it needs liquidity — inherently unpredictable, deal by deal, LP by LP. A GP-led transaction, by contrast, is initiated by the fund manager on its own schedule, typically when a fund's contractual life is ending and the GP wants to keep a specific winning asset rather than being forced to sell it into whatever market exists at that moment. That control over timing lets GPs run a more deliberate, better-marketed process.

The GP has a direct financial incentive to originate deals

A continuation fund transaction crystallizes carried interest for the GP and starts a fresh fee and carry clock on the new vehicle — a direct financial incentive that doesn't exist to nearly the same degree in a standard LP-led sale, where the GP is largely a bystander to a transaction between two outside parties. That incentive has made GPs active originators of secondary volume, not just passive administrators of it.

Institutional buyer capital has scaled to meet the supply

Dedicated GP-led secondary specialists — platforms like ICG Strategic Equity, which focuses exclusively on this structure — have raised enough capital that large, complex continuation fund transactions can actually get done at scale. A decade ago, the buyer-side capital to absorb billion-dollar continuation vehicles simply didn't exist in the same depth; see the fullbuyer & fund directory for how that capital base has built out.

What this shift means for LPs evaluating a rollover offer

Because GPs have a real incentive to originate these deals, LPs on the receiving end of a continuation fund offer should weigh that incentive explicitly, not assume the GP's enthusiasm for the structure is a neutral signal about the asset's quality. Seethe conflict of interest at the heart of every continuation fund for the safeguards that have emerged in response, andGP-led continuation vehicles for the mechanics of how a rollover actually works.