A new kind of liquidity: secondaries and continuation funds set records in H1 2026

In the first six months of 2026, the secondary market — where stakes in private funds change hands — surpassed $120 billion, a 20% increase over an already record H1 2025, according to Evercore data cited by PitchBook. The headline number matters less than the composition: GP-led deals accounted for the majority of volume, and most of that came from vehicles built around a single asset.

Exits have reopened — but unevenly

The Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor describes a market breaking records on nearly every aggregate metric, with far messier details underneath: rounds of $100 million or more captured 87.5% of the $412.7 billion deployed in H1, and AI absorbed 86% of all venture dollars. On the exit side, SpaceX's $1.7 trillion listing alone generated more exit value in a single quarter than the entire prior decade combined, while OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially to go public.

Beyond those headline events the picture is duller. S&P Global Market Intelligence reports that the number of private equity exits slowed in H1 2026 as buyers and sellers struggled to agree on price; healthcare produced five of the ten largest PE or VC exits, led by Eli Lilly's $7.86 billion acquisition of Centessa Pharmaceuticals. Liquidity, in short, is concentrated in a narrow set of assets while the long tail of portfolios stays frozen.

Continuation funds: returning cash without selling the company

The mechanism is simple in principle: a manager creates a new vehicle that buys one or more portfolio companies with backing from secondary buyers, returning cash to the original fund's investors while keeping the assets. In H1 2026, single-asset vehicles reached $34 billion — more than half of GP-led volume, per PitchBook — and a record number of managers used the structure to distribute cash without selling outright.

Volume comes with a fee story. William Blair's 2026 secondary market report finds 75% of continuation funds charging management fees between 50 and 100 basis points, 14% above 100 basis points and 11% below 50, with the inclusion of unfunded capital remaining a defining structural feature. PitchBook separately notes that in H1 2026 sponsors pushed to capture a larger share of the profits. For LPs, these terms matter more than the headline volume.

• Who values the asset, and which independent secondary buyers price it
• Management fee levels and how carried interest is structured in the new vehicle
• Whether unfunded commitments are included in the fee base
• Concentration risk: a single asset means no diversification
• The choice offered to existing investors: cash out or roll forward

The knock-on effect: new capital also pools at the top

Slow liquidity in the tail feeds directly into fundraising. As summarised from the Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Founders Fund together accounted for 48.1% of all US venture capital raised in H1 2026, while first-time fund formation is tracking toward its lowest level since 2016. PitchBook frames this as a liquidity squeeze that favours incumbents: LPs cannot keep committing without distributions, so they retreat to established names.

For emerging managers, the practical result is longer fundraising cycles even as conditions improve. For founders, it means later-stage capital is not automatically abundant simply because aggregate volumes are at record levels: money moves through narrow channels, and more investors now underwrite a deal by asking what the exit path is and how long it takes, rather than looking at growth alone.