North American VC AUM forecast to hit $2 trillion by 2030 — sounds healthy until you understand what it actually means.

That $2 trillion represents a 30% increase over five years, or a 5.4% annualized growth rate. For context, AUM grew 78.3% between 2020 and 2025. The engine is cooling and that’s before you account for the enormous uncertainty baked into the forecast.

Let’s break down what’s actually going on.

Read more

Let’s break down what moved the needle this week across Private Equity, Venture Capital, and Private Credit.

Read more

Fundraising activity accelerated across both startups and venture funds, with infrastructure AI, fintech, and applied enterprise software leading the cycle. Meanwhile, LPs continue to prioritize established GPs over emerging managers a trend becoming impossible to ignore.

Read more

Something has shifted in how institutional LPs are thinking about their venture exposure. It’s not just that more of them want to co-invest — it’s why they want to, and what they’re willing to pay (and risk) to do it. A new analyst note from PitchBook’s Institutional Research Group puts hard numbers to what many of us have been sensing in conversations with GPs and peer allocators. The picture is more nuanced and more cautionary than the deal-flow excitement might suggest.

Here’s what the data says, and what it means for how you should be thinking about your direct program.

Read more

The week of May 1–8 cemented three dominant themes shaping US private markets in early 2026: enterprise agentic AI is commanding growth-stage valuations previously reserved for public markets, defense-tech is absorbing institutional conviction at a record pace, and the secondary / growth-stage fund landscape is consolidating rapidly around a small number of elite managers. Sierra's $950 million Series E at a $15.8 billion valuation — the week's most closely watched deal illustrated how AI customer-experience companies are now valued on the same forward-revenue multiples as SaaS incumbents. Meanwhile, World Labs (Fei-Fei Li's spatial AI lab) closed $1 billion at Series C, and True Anomaly's $650 million Series D underscored a structural shift of sovereign and institutional capital into space-based national security technology. On the fund side, 137 Ventures' $700M+ dual-fund close and the Kline Hill / Cendana $400M VC secondaries vehicle signal that liquidity engineering not just primary deployment has become core to how sophisticated GPs structure their strategies heading into H2 2026.

Read more

There's a persistent tension in venture allocation: everyone knows capital has been flooding into the Bay Area, but the crowded-market skeptic asks whether that flood has compressed returns to the point where the premium is no longer justified. Latest regional returns analysis covering seed through Series D+ investments since 2009 offers a clear answer. At early stages, the hubs win decisively. At later stages, the picture is far more interesting.

Read more

• US private markets remain structurally strong, with fundraising momentum rebounding into 2026 and North America maintaining global leadership.

• GP sentiment is improving, with ~59% optimistic about hitting fundraising targets despite LP selectivity and shifting allocation priorities.

• Clear bifurcation:

  • Mega-funds → facing LP fatigue

  • Mid-market & specialist funds → outperforming in fundraising

👉 Takeaway: LPs are reallocating toward focused strategies, operational alpha, and sector specialization (AI, defense, infrastructure).

Read more

We are at the very beginning of a 20-year capital expenditure cycle that will fundamentally restructure how work, value, and defensibility are defined across the global economy.

Here’s what every LP needs to understand.

Read more

Over the past year, the direct VC secondary market nearly doubled in value — from roughly $50 billion annualized in Q4 2024 to $91.7 billion by Q4 2025. Founders are selling. Employees are cashing out. Family offices are buying in. Platforms are multiplying. And the pitch is seductive: get exposure to the best private companies in the world — SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic — without waiting a decade for an IPO that may never come.

As LPs, this should feel familiar. Because we’ve seen this movie before.

Read more

LP lens

Capital is concentrating fast. The top 10 VC funds captured 43% of all fundraising dollars, and median time-to-close for US funds now exceeds 15 months — the slowest in a decade. For LPs, access to brand-name megafunds with AI deal flow has never mattered more.

Read more

Read more

Sands Capital closed Global Innovation Fund III at $1.1 billion in March 2026, above its $1.0 billion target and described the fund as oversubscribed. Publicly disclosed LP anchors were Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and funds managed by Hamilton Lane; Sands also said the close was supported by existing LPs and drew interest from technology company founders and executives, though those additional LPs were not publicly named.

Read more

What mattered this week

• AI specialist GPs could still close capital. The two cleanest fund-close signals were Sands Capital’s $1.1B Global Innovation Fund III and Gradient’s $220M Fund 5.

• Startup money stayed concentrated in mission-critical AI. The week’s notable rounds were not mostly “wrapper” software; they were AI biotech, cybersecurity, federal cloud, and automated research.

• Quantum’s most important capital event was an exit/liquidity signal. Horizon Quantum completed its dMY Squared combination, started trading on Nasdaq on March 20, and brought in nearly $120M of gross proceeds.

Read more

The latest publicly announced close from Glade Brook is the Glade Brook Gondola Fund, which closed at over $1 billion in March 2026. Glade Brook also filed a Form D for Strategic Growth V LP on February 5, 2026, but that filing showed $0 sold at the time of filing; I’m therefore treating Gondola as the latest closed fund for LP analysis purposes.

Read more

Read more

What happened: Updata Partners (Washington, D.C.) announced the final close of Updata Partners VIII, L.P. at $875M hard cap, meaningfully oversubscribed and closed in ~6 months.

Why LPs care: Updata is a capital-efficient B2B software growth equity platform positioned between venture and buyout with an explicit focus on founder-led / bootstrapped companies and a deal-structuring toolkit designed for downside protection.

1) Quick Take

Updata VIII is not a “frontier AI model” fund. It’s best understood as an allocator-friendly way to underwrite exposure to:

• AI-enabled B2B software where AI acts as a feature/GTМ accelerator, not the entire product.

• Data / analytics / infrastructure-adjacent software that benefits from AI-driven demand: integration, observability, security automation, cloud ops...

• A capital-efficiency tilt often first institutional that can matter in a market where growth at any price has been structurally de-emphasized.

Read more

Read more

Quantonation is one of the most established specialist managers dedicated to quantum + deep-physics venture, and just closed a materially larger Fund II (€220M). The key LP question: does a larger, more “industrialization-ready” quantum thesis translate into better risk-adjusted outcomes vs. the prior pioneer era?

Read more

1. OpenAI reset the private-market ceiling with a $110B round, largest-ever private tech raise

2. Quantum fundraising stayed alive and got more institutional: Quantonation’s second flagship fund closed at €220M with a notable LP roster.

3. Defense + AI governance risk moved from theoretical to operational: the Pentagon’s “supply-chain risk”action around Anthropic created immediate compliance ambiguity for contractors—Palantir explicitly in the blast radius.

Read more

What happened

Thrive Capital announced the close of Thrive X, with total capital “exceeding $10 billion”. The firm states the raise is split into $1B for early-stage and $9B for growth-stage investing.

Read more