Capital Without the Blind Pool: How Private Equity GPs Are Rethinking the Fundraise

By LN Sadani, Founder & CEO, Lensbridge Capital Pte. Ltd.

The Hardest Fundraising Market in a Decade

Asia Pacific private equity fundraising fell to approximately $58 billion in 2025, its lowest level in twelve years according to Bain & Company's Asia-Pacific Private Equity Report 2026 released in March. Regional dry powder declined from a 2023 peak of $315 billion to $240 billion by end-2025. Average buyout deal size fell to a five-year low of around $438 million, from roughly $630 million in 2024. Meanwhile, approximately 60 Asia Pacific-focused funds with targets above $1 billion remain in the market, representing more than 10% of global fundraising targets, well above the region's 5% share of recently closed funds. There are more funds chasing fewer committed dollars than in any recent cycle.

For Asian GPs, the capital-raising challenge is structural. The traditional route, which is to raise a successor fund, tell the story, wait eighteen to twenty-four months, and hope existing LPs re-up while new ones underwrite a blind pool, has become the slowest and most uncertain path to fresh capital in over a decade. LP investment committees are demanding evidence, not ambition. A 2025 McKinsey survey found that 2.5 times as many LPs now rank DPI as the single most critical performance metric compared with three years earlier. And Asian exit channels remain uneven: mainland China IPOs remain largely shut to USD funds, Korean listings are selective, Southeast Asia's public markets are thin, and the Indian IPO window that carried so much of the 2024 and early 2025 exit load has softened materially in 2026, with the BSE IPO Index down around 9% year to date and average listing gains turning negative.

In this environment, a growing number of Asian GPs are rethinking the question. Rather than asking how to raise the next blind-pool fund, they are asking how to raise capital at the asset level, for the companies they know best, from investors who can underwrite them directly. The answer, increasingly, looks like a GP-led secondary structured with a stapled primary commitment.

Rethinking GP-Led Secondaries as Capital Formation

GP-led secondaries are usually discussed as a liquidity tool. A GP wants to return cash to LPs in a tough exit market; a continuation vehicle provides that cash while allowing the GP to retain a trophy asset. That framing remains valid, but it is incomplete, and for Asian GPs facing a constrained fundraising environment, it misses the more interesting story.

The real innovation is structural: combining a secondary recapitalisation with a significant additional primary commitment. Incoming secondary capital prices existing LP interests at a fair market level, while new primary capital is committed alongside, earmarked for growth. In a single coordinated transaction, the GP achieves three objectives at once: liquidity for existing LPs who want out, a new institutional anchor who has underwritten a specific asset in detail, and fresh primary capital deployed immediately into a platform with a defined use case.

For the GP, this is fundraising. Not through a blind pool, not through an eighteen-month roadshow, not through sequential re-up conversations, but through a single process structured around one or two assets the market can diligence directly.

The global secondaries market has the capital to support this at scale. Transaction volumes reached roughly $226 billion in 2025 according to Evercore, a 41% jump year on year and a record for the asset class. GP-led activity alone contributed approximately $106 billion, up from $48 billion in 2022. In the StepStone/Bain 2026 GP survey, roughly a quarter of GPs globally had initiated or completed a continuation vehicle in the past two years, and around 40% said they planned to explore one. Asia's share of GP-led volumes is still small, rising from $1.6 billion to around $2 billion in the most recent Greenhill measurement, but the pipeline is visibly deeper. More than half of APAC respondents in the 2026 Global Private Equity Outlook said they plan to increase their use of GP-led secondaries over the next 24 months, compared with just 10% a year earlier.

Why the Hybrid Structure Works for Asian GPs

Three features make the secondary-plus-primary structure particularly well-suited to Asia's current conditions.

Identified asset, identified thesis. New investors commit to a platform they can underwrite directly, rather than to a blind pool. In a market where LP investment committees are demanding more specificity and less narrative, this is a material advantage.

Self-selecting existing LP base. LPs who believe in the asset roll forward and receive continued exposure on preferred terms; those who prefer liquidity exit cleanly at a market-tested price. There is far less political overhead than in a traditional fundraise.

Immediate capital deployment. The primary commitment lands in a vehicle that can deploy it immediately into known, accretive uses, rather than sitting as dry powder awaiting proprietary deal flow. For LPs sensitive to the J-curve and the time value of money, this is a meaningful feature.

For Asian GPs with one or two high-conviction platform assets and visible growth capital needs, this structure is a credible alternative to a traditional blind-pool raise. In some cases, it is a better one.

The Case Study: Neovantage Innovation Parks

The Neovantage Innovation Parks recapitalisation is, in my view, the clearest recent Asian example of GP-led secondaries deployed as a fundraising mechanism rather than purely as a liquidity tool.

The transaction brought Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate arm of CDPQ (now La Caisse), into Neovantage Innovation Parks, formerly known as MN Parks, alongside Lighthouse Canton. Lensbridge Capital acted as the sole financial advisor on the transaction. The platform is South Asia's largest privately operated life sciences R&D real estate portfolio, located in Genome Valley, Hyderabad, with more than 1.1 million square feet operational and additional capacity under construction, anchored by marquee multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology tenants.

What made the transaction structurally distinctive was the combination of a secondary recapitalisation with a significant additional primary commitment to grow the platform. Existing investors received liquidity at an attractive outcome, the incoming institutional capital underwrote continued ownership of a trophy asset, and the platform itself received fresh capital earmarked for the next phase of development and portfolio expansion. In effect, the sponsor raised meaningful new capital at the asset level in a single coordinated process, well outside the mechanics of a traditional blind-pool fundraise.

The deal is also instructive for what it demonstrated about LP appetite. Top-tier global institutional capital will underwrite Asian platforms when the underlying asset quality, governance, and growth thesis meet global standards, and will commit fresh primary capital on top of secondary pricing when the use of proceeds is clearly defined.

A Template That Now Has Multiple Reference Points

Neovantage is not the only Asian GP-led transaction worth studying. ChrysCapital's roughly $700 million single-asset continuation vehicle for its stake in the National Stock Exchange of India, Multiples Alternate Asset Management's $430 million multi-asset continuation fund covering Vastu Housing Finance, Quantiphi and APAC Financial Services, Kedaara Capital's $300 million debut continuation vehicle housing partial stakes in Lenskart and Care Health Insurance, MBK Partners' roughly $500 million single-asset continuation fund for Korean fried chicken franchisor BHC, L Catterton's $360 million multi-asset Asia consumer continuation fund, and Navis Capital Partners' $230 million Next Generation Fund for its Southeast Asian K-12 schools platform have each been successfully completed. Several of these transactions included primary capital commitments alongside the secondary, blurring the traditional line between liquidity event and capital raise.

Together they demonstrate that the template works across geographies, sectors and asset types, from trophy single-asset CVs in financial services to thematic multi-asset consumer baskets, from Korean QSR platforms to Southeast Asian education. The structural common denominator, and the one most relevant to GPs thinking about fundraising strategy, is that each transaction raised capital for a specific asset or portfolio that investors could diligence directly, with a clear plan for deployment.

What This Means for Asian GPs

For Asian GPs mapping out their capital-raising strategy over the next eighteen months, three takeaways follow.

First, GP-led secondaries should no longer be framed internally as a fallback liquidity option. For any GP with a high-conviction platform asset approaching year six or seven of fund life, the question is not whether a continuation vehicle is needed, but whether a secondary-plus-primary structure could raise capital more efficiently than the next successor fund.

Second, the instrument is better suited to some asset types than others. Platforms with identifiable follow-on capital needs, clear expansion pipelines, and institutional-grade governance are the strongest candidates. Trophy single assets with compounding profiles and multi-asset baskets with thematic coherence both work. Legacy portfolios without a credible growth narrative do not.

Third, timing matters. The six-to-seven year window has emerged globally as the optimal point in the fund life for these structures. Launching too late signals distress; too early, and the value-creation case is thin. For Asian GPs sitting on 2018 to 2020 vintage funds with one or two assets that have clearly outperformed, the window is open now.

The Asian GP-led market is no longer an afterthought in global private equity. For GPs who are prepared to treat it as a primary capital-raising tool rather than a defensive liquidity instrument, it is one of the most useful adjacencies available in the current cycle.