A rebound in fundraising Download PitchBook’s Report here. Fundraising is rebounding, according to PitchBook’s latest US PE Breakdown Report. 97 funds closed in Q1 totaling $88.5 billion, though more than half ($45.6 billion) of that dollar amount went to three massive funds raised by Silver Lake, CD&R and New Mountain Capital. At the other end of

Exit ramps remained open in Q1 Download PitchBook’s Report here. US PE exit activity continued its tear in Q1, according to PitchBook’s latest US PE Breakdown Report. Another $162 billion worth of exits was offloaded to start the year, not far off the record-setting fourth quarter of $176.3 billion. That adds up to $338.3 billion, more

A strong start to the year Download PitchBook’s Report here. Fourth quarter deal momentum spilled into 2021, resulting in record Q1 numbers for the US PE market. PitchBook’s latest US PE Breakdown Report calculates a $203 billion quarter on 1,763 deals across the country. That’s only the fourth time that a quarter has breached the $200

Buy-and-build correlates to more secondary buyouts PitchBook is publishing a new analyst note next week that does a deep dive on add-ons. One of the more striking findings is a correlation between additive platforms and how they eventually exit. The more add-ons a portfolio company undergoes, the more likely it will be acquired by another

Quantifying style drift An upcoming PitchBook analyst note takes a look at GP style drift. It’s an important topic but a frustrating one for LPs. Quantifying the drift is tricky. Our framework assigns style scores to the PE firms themselves over time, instead of at the fund level. We broke the style definitions into three

A good word for private equity Download PitchBook’s Report here. A quick break this week from the usual hard numbers and trendlines. PitchBook is working with the American Investment Council on a series of PE papers, and our latest is out today. In the healthcare space, PE firms are doing a lot of good in two

The middle market had a huge fourth quarter Download PitchBook’s Report here. PitchBook’s latest Middle Market Report is now live, and the fourth quarter sure delivered. Our analysts estimate deal flow more than doubled between Q3 and Q4, from 667 deals to 1,428 deals to close out the year. Dollars invested came close to doubling as

Introducing PitchBook’s Capital Call at Risk metric PitchBook is rolling out a new framework for our LP clients to prepare them for worst-case capital call scenarios. We’re calling it the Capital Call at Risk (CCaR) metric, which is based on the Value at Risk (VaR) framework popularized by JP Morgan in the 1980s....

More nuance around first-time funds Download PitchBook’s Report here. Past PitchBook research has found statistical outperformance for first-time PE funds compared to follow-on funds. That note was one among many studies that arrived at the same conclusion: first-time funds tend to do relatively well, for a variety of reasons. PitchBook just released a follow-on note (so

Big bumps in IRR data PE returns bounced back in a big way in mid-2020, according to PitchBook’s upcoming Global Fund Performance Report. After cratering by -8.32% in the first quarter, IRRs were above 9% in both Q2 and Q3. The third quarter mark of 9.81% is preliminary data, but it would be the highest