This year’s PEI 300 – our annual ranking of the five‑year fundraising totals of the world’s largest private equity firms – shows fundraising returning to near‑normal levels after a muted 2025. Capital raised hit a record $3.55 trillion, an 8 percent increase on last year, compared with just 0.37 percent growth in 2025.

Technology managers faced a tougher environment, with several slipping down the ranking. Meanwhile, private wealth continues to gain momentum as more firms prioritise it as a source of capital.

To unpack what this means for the industry, PEI Group’s senior content producer Evie Rusman is joined by Adam Le, senior editor for private equity, and Kristina Savcenkova, research manager. Together, they break down the numbers and explore what they signal about the evolving private equity landscape.

This is the third episode in Private Equity International’s new Data Dive miniseries, where we dig into our proprietary data, surveys and rankings, as well as recent market data sets, to understand what investors and fund managers are thinking, where capital is moving and how the asset class is evolving.

Listen to previous episodes here and stay tuned for upcoming episodes, which will provide insight into affiliate title Private Funds CFO’s Fees and Expenses Survey 2026 and the 2026 edition of PEI’s Global Investor 150 ranking.

This episode is sponsored by AlixPartners

The Disruption Matters special podcast miniseries is returning for its fifth season, and this year, leading industry experts will share their advice on how to generate successful exits during a climate defined by their scarcity.

In this teaser episode, we set the stage by exploring all the factors that make exits so elusive right now. We’ll be discussing both the forces GPs can control, and those they can’t – from broader market conditions to decisions around talent, tech and value creation. The good news is that there is a playbook to address the headwinds. The bad news is that it leaves little margin for error and requires unwavering focus, creativity and discipline.

In this episode:

• Jason McDannold is co-lead of the Americas private equity practice at AlixPartners
• Ted Bililies is global leader of transformative leadership at AlixPartners
• Gregg Jankowski is global co-leader of data and visualization at AlixPartners

This episode is sponsored by FTV Capital and J.C. Flowers & Co

Financial services is one of the most active sectors in private equity dealmaking, but getting the highest returns requires deep sector expertise, especially in today's challenging exit environment.

In this episode, PE Hub editor-in-chief Mary Kathleen Flynn speaks with Peter Yordán, a managing director of J.C. Flowers & Co, and Kyle Griswold, a partner at FTV Capital, to find out what makes financial services different from other sectors. We also hear their strategies for successful dealmaking, including how AI is changing the landscape.

In the third episode of PEI Group’s Commitment Issues podcast miniseries, Joana Rocha Scaff of Neuberger Berman and Alexis Maskell of BC Partners unwrap the competitive world of private equity co-investments.

Over the past few years, such deals have become an expected feature of a GP’s offering, with both investors and managers honing their approaches accordingly.

As a very hands-on co-investor, Neuberger Berman looks to “re-underwrite” the asset alongside the GP, Scaff says. She highlights some of the issues that commonly crop up during the process, pointing to bugbears such as GPs going back on promises made or co-investments being pulled into continuation vehicles.

For his part, Maskell outlines why he wants to see a variety of sophistication levels among LPs participating in co-investments, including what he likes – and prefers not – to see from clients, and how both sides can work together most effectively.

This episode is sponsored by Cinven and KPMG

Private equity firms are accustomed to navigating change, but operating partner teams in particular have had to become more agile in recent years.

As volatility becomes the new normal – from macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty to AI-related disruption – operating partners need to continuously reassess the value creation levers they are pulling to drive portfolio company growth, while also building resilience across their portfolios. This, in turn, is leading sponsors to reimagine their operating partner teams, in terms of structure and skill sets, as well as the way in which they engage with portfolio company management.

In this episode of Private Equity Spotlight, Louise Fordham, head of special projects for private equity at PEI group, sits down with Sam Williams, managing director of strategy and investment insights at international private equity firm Cinven, and Paul Pan, private equity leader for the deal advisory and strategy practice at KPMG, to discuss the future outlook for value creation strategies.

As private markets mature and competition intensifies, investors are searching for ways to better measure risk, performance and true manager outperformance.

Peer‑group comparisons and fund‑level IRRs may tell part of the story, but they are insufficient for knowing whether a GP is really achieving the alpha they might claim.

In this episode, Frédéric Blanc‑Brude, CEO of Scientific Infra & Private Assets (SIPA), discusses why asset‑level data and benchmarking are becoming essential tools for investors. He explains how SIPA’s indices were developed to address long‑standing private markets data gaps, why the firm recently joined PEI Group, and how asset‑level benchmarks can help LPs determine whether GPs are genuinely generating alpha, or simply telling a compelling story.

Learn more about Scientific Infra & Private Assets at sipametrics.com

How is market sentiment shaping secondaries fundraising and deal activity?

In this episode of PEI’s Data Dive podcast, PEI’s senior content producer, Evie Rusman, is joined by Secondaries Investor editor Madeleine Farman and PEI head of special projects for private equity Louise Fordham to discuss the findings from PEI Group title Secondaries Investor’s Global Market Survey 2026. The survey, conducted in partnership with Goodwin, polled LPs, GPs, secondaries buyers and the intermediary community about market trends, transaction processes, deployment issues, regulation and more.

Download a data pack of the findings discussed in the podcast episode here. PEI’s new Data Dive miniseries digs into our proprietary data, surveys and rankings, as well as recent market data sets, to understand what investors and fund managers are thinking, where capital is moving and how private markets are evolving.

Stay tuned for the next episode, which will provide insight into the 2026 edition of the PEI 300 – our annual ranking measuring the five-year fundraising totals of the world’s biggest private equity firms.

This episode is sponsored by Davis Polk and DC Advisory

Senior dealmakers at established firms increasingly seem to be choosing to strike out on their own, much like those firms’ original founders once did during the surge in mid-market firms during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But in those years, institutional capital was flooding into a PE market that had proven its model repeatable, whereas the landscape for new firms today is markedly different. Not only do LPs want to see differentiated strategies with a compelling story and outsized returns, they want the young managers with whom they invest to have institutional-level operations and infrastructure.

In this episode, Buyouts senior editor Graham Bippart sits down with Michael Hong, a partner in the Investment Management practice at Davis Polk, and Donato de Donato, co-lead of DC Advisory’s GP Strategic Advisory practice, to discuss the state of the emerging manager market.

They point out that there is no shortage of challenges and complications lying in wait for would-be new managers, who often may be more restricted by their previous employers than they thought, make all-too-common mistakes in their pitch decks, and may even have notions about the most important first hires they should make. But in an ever-more-crowded market, those who can carve out a unique and compelling strategy are best poised to lure LP interest away from long-established managers.

This episode was produced alongside Buyouts’ annual Emerging Managers Report, done in association with Gen II.