What’s next for CVs?
In 2025, CVs accounted for 14% of all sponsor-backed exits, up from 5% in 2020, according to Jefferies. This is unsurprising at a time when exit markets have been difficult and the backlog of unrealised assets has continued growing. Yet global PE exits are now finally ticking up – they came back strongly at the end of 2025, with full-year values and volumes the second highest on record. So, are CVs still relevant?
Jolly says that some types of transaction may decline in popularity, such as those “purely driven to boost the distributions to paid-in capital of funds towards the end of their lives that are trying to sell portfolios in multi-asset deals”.
However, Jolly believes that CVs will continue to be an enduring feature of the market. “They are not just about liquidity,” he says. “There are lots of reasons for GPs to want to hold a company for longer than some of their LPs, including taking the business to the next stage and continuing to create and realise value. Many GPs that we speak to have made it clear to their LPs that they should expect CVs to be an exit route for some of their portfolio companies.”
LPs should be asking GPs what return they expect for the CV. But they also need help to understand the mechanics of the process as the asset goes from the fund to the CV and the cash flows that happen in and alongside that.
David Jolly, Coller Capital
And for Marini Clarelli, they are part of private markets’ natural shift, which includes the rise of evergreen funds, towards allowing investors to choose which assets they want to invest in. “It has become ever harder to create value in PE,” he explains. “You need to get your hands dirty and it takes time, especially if you are changing people, and then it takes more time to prepare the company for exit and run the process. It takes more than five years. And then you have LPs dealing with capital calls and distributions and fund structures built to maximise IRR – this is not aligned with long-term investors with an infinite investment horizon. Overall, CVs and evergreens are part of the same evolution as PE moves towards longer investment horizons, semi-liquid products and a much larger secondaries market.”
All of which means that LPs may well have to rethink how they approach CVs. “Once we have more data on the realised performances of CVs, it would be very interesting to see what the impact of the decision to sell is on these LPs,” says Luepertz. “If CVs end up with realised IRRs of 30% to 40%, the majority may wish they had stayed invested. Once we see more of the realised returns, LPs can – and should – revisit their decisions and their processes.”
