Blue Owl launches $3B GP-led secondaries strategy

2026-02-27 18:15:02

Blue Owl launches $3B GP-led secondaries strategy

Jessica Hamlin

Thu, February 12, 2026 at 6:00 AM GMT+9 3 min read

Blue Owl Capital has raised more than $3 billion in commitments for its first dedicated secondaries strategy, a product co-chief executive Marc Lipschultz has described as “the best way to participate in private equity today.”

The NYSE-listed asset manager with over $307 billion in assets under management, mainly in private credit, will use Blue Owl Strategic Equity to invest in continuation vehicles and other minority transactions in which some investors are looking to cash out of privately held companies while others want to stay invested.

“We’re the ones that provide that liquidity to bridge between those two,” Lipschultz said on a second-quarter earnings call last year.

GP-led secondary deals, of which continuation funds are the most common type, can provide institutional and wealth investors with “the greatest hits of private equity,” he said. Fund managers self-select which companies they want to hold onto, helping investors identify the best opportunities from the “thousands of companies owned by PE and the trillions of dollars held” by PE funds.

This curation makes GP-led deals especially well-suited to rich individual investors, who account for 42.9% of Blue Owl’s total AUM, the largest share among the six largest publicly traded alternative asset managers in the US. Blackstone comes in second place with 23.4% of its AUM in its private wealth business, according to PitchBook’s Q3 2025 US Public PE and GP Deal Roundup.

New York State Common Retirement Fund, Arkansas Local Police and Fire Retirement System, Kern County Employees’ Retirement Association and Richard Salomon Family Foundation are among the institutional backers of BOSE, as it is also known, according to PitchBook.

The close of BOSE marks Blue Owl’s first dedicated strategy to buy into the GP-led market, which reached a record $106 billion in transaction volume last year, according to Evercore, the industry’s largest intermediary.

Blue Owl has already led some deals, including in August 2024, giving LPs invested in the nation’s largest Taco Bell franchisee, Tacala, the option to cash out. Tacala is owned by Altamont Capital Partners.

Secondaries funds were on track for a record-breaking fundraising year in 2025, having raised $122.6 billion for the trailing four quarters ending in Q3 2025, according to PitchBook’s Q3 2025 Global Private Market Fundraising Report. Year-end data has not yet been published.

Most of the capital raised last year went to funds with assets of more than $5 billion, a majority of which buy diversified portfolios of fund stakes from institutional investors in addition to GP-led deals. Private equity manager Ardian, for example, raised the largest secondaries fund ever at $30 billion.

Story continues

Increasingly, funds are being raised that only back concentrated GP-led deals. In March 2025, Intermediate Capital Group announced it raised $11 billion for its sixth strategic equity program, making it by some distance the largest fund dedicated to GP-led deals.

Blackstone, Lexington Partners and Ardian have all raised or are raising dedicated GP-led funds, alongside groups such as Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Pantheon.

This article originally appeared on PitchBook News

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