Private Equity 8 Hours

Last updated: March 23, 2026, 6:30 PM ET

Dealmaking & Exits

Private equity deal flow saw several large-scale maneuvers across technology and infrastructure, with Francisco Partners divesting its music publishing arm, Kobalt, to a consortium backed by Brookfield's Primary Wave, ensuring the management team remains in place under Laurent Hubert. In the defense sector, Arlington Capital moved to acquire Eptec Defence, a specialist provider of naval and defense preservation services, signaling continued appetite for niche government contractors. Concurrently, speculation intensified around one of Europe’s largest pending sales, as Advent & Cinven explore a potential €25 billion exit of TK Elevator, with Kone reportedly entering advanced discussions to purchase the private equity-owned vertical transport giant.

Secondaries Market & Capital Allocations

Investor demand for liquidity is driving significant activity in the secondary market, exemplified by the University of California system shopping a substantial $3 billion limited partner portfolio seeking to offload assets. This push for capital recycling mirrors advisory trends, as demonstrated by AltamarCAM securing Mercer’s expertise in secondary capabilities, a move Michael Dempsey noted provides a "missing link" precisely when heightened interest in liquidity mandates such specialized knowledge. Meanwhile, institutional investors continue to shape their long-term mandates; Aware Super appointed Alex Satchcroft to lead its $11 billion private equity allocation, signaling a focused strategy for managing its considerable alternative assets portfolio.

Venture Funding & Gulf Energy Plays

The early-stage funding environment showed clear signs of deceleration, largely driven by a sharp slowdown in March attributable almost entirely to delays in closing massive artificial intelligence megarounds. Despite this cooling in earlier stages, capital deployment remains aggressive in specific high-growth niches, evidenced by Gimlet Labs successfully raising an $80 million Series A round to tackle the AI inference bottleneck by optimizing workloads across diverse chip architectures, including NVIDIA and AMD. Looking toward large-scale infrastructure, private equity and infrastructure funds are targeting a $7 billion Kuwait pipeline deal, demonstrating sustained international interest in Gulf energy assets despite broader market volatility.