Benjamin Carper
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Well, continuation vehicles
represent one of the fastest growing and probably most innovative parts of the private markets.
They will be announced in the next week or so north of $110 billion of continuation vehicle volume in 2025.
That's a second record year in a row for the market and up quite significantly from where we were in 2024 at about $75 billion in continuation vehicle volume.
It's quite broadly distributed amongst a variety of not just
mid-market, large cap, smaller cap buyout focus firms, but venture capital firms.
Are these $20 million vehicles, $200 million vehicles?
The general market is around a half billion dollars of size for an individual continuation vehicle with the range between
$100 million to $5 billion.
The companies that are being involved, contributed to continuation vehicles are companies that can be $50 million of EBITDA or $500 million of EBITDA.
There's definitely a strong cohort of
mid-market companies that are being targeted by continuation vehicles, but we're also seeing continuation vehicles for pre-IPO VC darlings as well, the Stripes and Databricks and Anthropix of the world.
It's a confluence of factors that is driving the category forward and really up and to the right these last couple of years.
What continuation vehicles do at their core is help sponsors
manage portfolio companies that are not necessarily well timed to the 10-year closed-end private equity fund lifecycle.
You know, the five-year hold period that you oftentimes hear private equity firms talk about.
That's exactly why the market has accelerated as it has.
And the solution, the continuation vehicle market is looking to provide.
There's obviously a lot of friction that happens when a company is sold and a board changes over and a management team is reintroduced to, or introduced rather, to new owners, potentially replaced.
You know, there are a lot of private equity owned businesses that have established growth plans and a playbook that's really working, be it organic or inorganic trajectories.